


Unexpected

by effing_gravity (Malteaser)



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, M/M, People Being Fundamentally People And Therefore Sometimes Downright Evil, Spanish Inquisition, Temporary Amnesia, Walking Anxiety Attack 4 Walking Anxiety Attack, You've heard of Moron4Moron? Well let me present to you:
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21701593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malteaser/pseuds/effing_gravity
Summary: The last thing Crowley remembered, it was February of 1481, and he was getting spectacularly drunk in the one tavern in Seville which had yet to throw him out. And then, very suddenly, it was July of 2029, and he was in England with an older Aziraphale who kept smiling at him and calling him "my dear".This isn't how his life is supposed to go. Something must be wrong here.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 99
Kudos: 431





	1. Chapter 1

Crowley, much to his own disgust, woke up.  
  
It wasn’t like he actually thought that he could discorporate himself with liver failure, or even really wanted to deal with the hassle of discorporation on top of- well, everything. The world. Things. But it would have been nice to be insensate for a while longer. Maybe a decade or two, just until things calmed down…  
  
Well he was awake now, and also, now realizing that where he was didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It was too hot, for one thing. For another, he could hear the sea. There was something stiff and vaguely fabric like beneath him, but he didn’t recognize the texture. His tongue flicked out, and the air was packed with scents he couldn’t recognize.  
  
Nothing seemed to be burning nearby, though. There was that, at least.  
  
He opened his eyes and realized that he was indoors. Part of him recognized that, if he really had drank so much that he’d passed out, he probably should have woken up outside in the gutter, if not in prison. The rest of him was trying to make sense of the room he found himself in.  
  
It was absurdly clean, for one thing. The panes of glass he could see on the window were uniformly made, and there were so many of them. There were- crates? Chests? Boxes?- made of something not quite paper and less like wood scattered around, and on the far end of the room there was a large black rectangle of something semi-reflective.  
  
Next to him, on the carpet- was it a carpet? It went all the way through to the walls, fitting perfectly, that was some high quality work there- was an infernal dagger. This was less alarming than the sight of the clothing he was wearing.  
  
“Satan, I could start a riot in this,” he said, plucking that the oddly heavy fabric covering his legs like a second skin. It didn’t have a lot of give. His shirt had something written on it, but he couldn’t quite make out the words. Fucking textura cursive, he ought to try and get a commendation for _that_.  
  
He looked around. When nothing appeared in the room to explain itself, he picked up the dagger, and then himself. Time to find some kind of explanation.  
  
In the very next room over, there was not an explanation, but there was Aziraphale, tied to a chair. His clothing was also very strange, albeit in a different way to Crowley’s clothing.  
  
“Aziraphale! What’s happened, what's going on?” he asked, laying down the infernal dagger on one of the not-paper box thingies far away from the angel.  
  
“Mmmph!” Aziraphale was also gagged apparently, with some kind of shiny grey square of something that seemed to be fused to his face.

“Satan!” Crowley hissed, scrambling over to him. “Hang on, I’ll just-” He felt carefully around the edges of the square, and found that he could get his fingernails under the edges and peel it carefully off of him.  
  
It was very sticky. It stuck to his hands once he was done with pulling it off of Aziraphale’s face.  
  
“What _is_ this stuff?” he asked, and did a double take as he took in Aziraphale’s face. “Never mind that, why do you look _old_?” It wasn’t something about his corporation, though that too seemed slightly different. It wasn’t anything that could have been perceived by human eyes. There was a sort of dust that accumulated on the soul or spirit or whatever you wanted to call it as a result of living on Earth. Aziraphale had more than he should have had- centuries more.  
  
Aziraphale was looking up at him in horror. “You’re- Crowley, what’s the last thing you remember?”  
  
Crowley did not _want_ to remember. That had been the point of getting so drunk in the first place.  
  
“Getting completely shitfaced in a tavern just outside Seville,” he said, which was true enough without going into the specifics.  
  
Aziraphale looked, if anything, even more horrified. “The Spanish Inquisition?”  
  
“I didn’t do it!” Crowley protested reflexively, even as Aziraphale said, with mounting rage “They took all your memories back to Spanish fucking Inquisition?”  
  
It was the profanity that really knocked Crowley for a loop. “What- I, uh. What?”  
  
“I know it wasn’t you,” Aziraphale said, his voice suddenly quite soft. “I never, even for a moment, believed it was you.”  
  
“Oh. Well.” There were a lot of emotions swelling in his chest, relief being the safest one. He pushed it down, and tried to get the sticky square to stop sticking to his fingers. Eventually he gave up and told it on no uncertain terms that it would stick to the leg of the chair Aziraphale was tied to and nothing else if it knew what was good for it. Then, feeling slightly calmer for having accomplished something, he ran Aziraphale’s words back. “What was that about memories?”  
  
“Could you untie me while I try to explain?” Aziraphale asked. “These are infernal ropes so-”  
  
“Shit, hang on-” Crowley scrambled around for the knot, wincing at the sheer unholy power that jolted from it to his fingertips like a particularly nasty static shock. It was a good thing Aziraphale like getting his clothes on Earth instead of miracling them into being. They would have eaten away at something conjured by a Heavenly miracle, and the burns from these could have been life threatening.  
  
“It’s July 18th, 2029,” Aziraphale told him. Crowley forced himself not to be shocked by it, and continued to untie the angel. “We’re in the South Downs, the part which is on the south coast of England. We’d come to try and complete the warding spells for the cottage, but before we could complete them, we were ambushed.”  
  
“We’re working together then?” Crowley asked. He’d been trying to get Aziraphale to agree to work with him, and there had been a few times where the angel had not quite disagreed- a few assignments they found repugnant and needed an excuse not to complete, here and there. Some coordination, when neither of them was particularly fussed by what they were doing, so they didn’t step on one another’s toes. But Aziraphale had always been very clear that they were not working _together_ , so much as they were coordinating their own _separate_ works to avoid any unnecessary unpleasantness.  
  
“Yes. And quite officially, too.”  
  
Crowley couldn’t quite contain his shock at that. On the one hand: yeah, it made sense. Of course Aziraphale would only really work with him if Heaven approved it. On the other, significantly weightier hand: what the fuck was out there that had made Heaven and Hell decide to work together?  
  
“Is there a _third_ side?” Crowley demanded.  
  
“Yes. Ours.”  
  
Crowley had enough presence of mind to make sure that the ropes didn’t touch Aziraphale’s bare hands as they slipped off onto the floor, and not enough for much of anything else besides gaping.  
  
“What?” he managed to croak eventually.  
  
“Could you please keep untying me?” Aziraphale asked.  
  
“Yeah. Sure,” Crowley gave himself a little shake. “Can you try to explain what- and, and how did-”  
  
“The world was supposed to end ten years ago,” Aziraphale said.  
  
“End?”  
  
“Yes, end. As in the End of Days, the Apocalypse, Armageddon,” Aziraphale said. “We didn’t like that. You, in particular, didn’t like it, and eventually I realized that I agreed with you. So we decided we would put a cork in it, so to speak.”  
  
“And that worked?” Crowley demanded.  
  
“We- it’s a long story. I think the shortest possible version is that it didn’t go even remotely as planned, but when the fateful day arrived the Antichrist was a perfectly normal and happy boy who didn’t want the world to end, and we’d more or less declared our subversive intentions directly to both Beelzebub and Gabriel.”  
  
“So now they want our deaths,” Crowley said, understanding clicking into place. “They thought I would kill you upon finding you like this, because that’s what the demon who created the Spanish Inquisition would do. And then- then what? Are they waiting for us?” _For me, after I’d killed you? Are they expecting to welcome me back into the fold, or to kill me as well?_  
  
“They’re probably watching,” Aziraphale confirmed as the last knot finally came loose. “So we should leave as quickly as possible. They left you a weapon, I presume?”  
  
“Yeah, it’s pretty well profaned, though,” Crowley said, sparing a glance for the dagger. “Probably forged directly in the fires of Hell and everything.”  
  
“Then you hold it,” Aziraphale said. “We’ve got to go. _Now_.”  
  
Crowley grabbed the dagger, and looked for something to wrap it up in. Before he could, however, Aziraphale had come up to him, Aziraphale _had taken his hand_ -  
  
“We need to go, my dear,” Aziraphale said. “Do you feel up for following me?”  
  
“Yeah,” Crowley. His voice did not squeak or shiver. He was really proud of that, good job him. He let Aziraphale project around the both of them, and then with a pop, they were gone.

* * *

They reappeared on the side of a busy road, though how Crowley knew it was a road at all was something he couldn’t quite explain. It was full of fast-moving metal _somethings_ , and loud, and the unnameable scents he’d tasted in the cottage were even thicker here.  
  
“Whoa,” Crowley said, clutching tightly to Aziraphale before he could quite remember not to. Aziraphale didn’t seem to mind.  
  
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make sure that no one will notice us, and we keep some spare glasses for you in the shop.”

Crowley had barely remembered that he’d woken up sans glasses until Aziraphale mentioned it. He nodded, and let Aziraphale guide them through the throngs of people to the shop.  
  
There was no need to ask which shop they were headed towards. It was the grand, old-looking bookshop, labelled A.Z. Fell & Co. It was the shop which radiated more celestial power than the two of them combined could have comfortably emitted, layered with ward upon ward, enchantments baked into the very mortar of the place. Some of them were old, decades and even centuries, almost all of them Aziraphale’s work, and almost all of them meant to keep humans from prying too closely. More of them were laid in the past decade or so, and Crowley recognized his own occult signature in roughly half of them.  
  
“This is a bloody fortress,” Crowley said. There were wards here that they would have had to bleed to produce- wards that would have required burnt feathers and all manner of difficult to procure occult and ethereal ingredients. And even- “Is that an amulet hanging over the door?”  
  
“You’re immune to it,” Aziraphale assured him. “And, yes, we utilized a few human security measures as well. Some rather old, and some very modern. There’s an alarm now, and security cameras. Top-notch fire suppression system too.”  
  
Crowley nodded, not quite understanding the words. “What was the cottage being warded for?”  
  
“Same as here, more or less,” Aziraphale said. “We just didn’t get as far as breaking out the ingredients for the more potent wards before being interrupted.”  
  
Crowley nodded again. He took in the shop as Aziraphale locked the door behind them with a clanking of metal that seemed too substantial for the little knob he’d turned.  
  
Books, books, and more books- yeah, this was Aziraphale’s place, no doubt about that. Many of the books looked strange to him, particularly the three shelves off to the side, in the only brightly-lit part of the shop. He supposed those were the newer ones- moveable type was a new enough invention that Aziraphale had spent a good chunk of the time they were Naples together talking about it. The process had probably evolved even further, nearly 550 years down the line.  
  
“You can stick the dagger in that cabinet over there,” Aziraphale said, nodded his head towards it. “It’ll unlock itself for you.”  
  
Crowley nodded, and went to place the dagger inside as instructed. As promised, the lock knew him and opened for him.  
  
There were other touches of his long-established presence here too. There was a hat on a rack near the entrance that he could tell he’d willed into being well over a century ago and then apparently left there. The rug on the main floor was one he last remembered seeing in his own house in Seville. There were plants scattered around the shop, whose leaves quaked as he passed them by. Most damningly of all came when Crowley followed Aziraphale to the till. There was a framed picture there, a hyper-realistic one of the two of them sitting at a table set for dinner, long wine glasses in hand. They were both smiling, and in clothes Crowley got the impression were fancy, though Aziraphale’s outfit wasn’t too different from what he was wearing now.  
  
Without meaning to, he reached out and took hold of the picture frame. He then promptly dropped it as the picture began to move.  
  
“Gah!” he shouted, leaping back. Aziraphale looked up at him in alarm.  
  
The picture landed face down, but it was emitted _sounds_.  
  
“So we just- do we say something for this?” came something like Aziraphale’s voice from the- whatever that was.  
  
“Yeah, sure,” came Crowley’s slightly-distorted voice from the same source. “Shall we toast to the world again?”  
  
“And to us,” Aziraphale agreed. There was the clink of glass on glass, and then the thing fell silent.  
  
“What the- just,” Crowley tried not to spluttered too badly and failed miserably. “What was that?”  
  
“It’s just a portrait, my dear,” Aziraphale said. “They don’t all move like that- it was actually quite a newfangled invention when we had that taken a few years back- but they’re growing increasingly common, as I understand it.”  
  
“Okay,” Crowley said. “Okay, okay. Cool, cool, cool, no doubt, no doubt, no doubt.” What were those words and why were they coming out of his mouth?  
  
They must have become a normal thing for him to say at some point, because Aziraphale made no comment. He just rummaged around in the drawers until he emerged with a pair of glasses for Crowley.  
  
“Here you go,” Aziraphale said, handing them to him. He took them numbly. “You don’t have to wear them indoors, of course, but you generally like to have them on you.”  
  
“Yeah. Yeah,” Crowley said, looking down at them. The glass was dark, and it was more-or-less the same shape as the pair he’d been wearing in Seville.  
  
Aziraphale picked up the portrait, and placed it back on the countertop, next to the till. Where he would be able to look at it, while he worked.  
  
“Aziraphale,” Crowley said, before he could lose his nerve. “Are we friends?”  
  
Aziraphale started, and inwardly Crowley winced. _Too fast!_ his brain screamed at him.  
  
“Of course we are,” Aziraphale said before Crowley could muster up an apology. “We’re the very best of friends.” He said it like it was inevitable. Of course they were friends. How could they be anything less?  
  
“Oh,” Crowley said with a grin he didn’t even try to suppress, and then folded the glasses and hung them upon the collar of his shirt. “Well, good.”  
  
“You must have questions,” Aziraphale offered after a moment.  
  
“I have so many questions I don’t even know where to start,” Crowley confirmed, aware that he was still grinning like a loon but not really able to care enough about it to stop.  
  
“Let’s go into the kitchen, then. I’ll pour us a drink and try to answer your questions as best I can.”  
  
“That sounds great, I’d like that.”  
  
Aziraphale lead the way through the back of the shop, past a small sitting room with a very inviting-looked couch, and into a small kitchen. Aziraphale went over to a cabinet, and Crowley draped himself into one of the tall chairs at the equally tall kitchen table without thinking too much about it.  
  
“What are you-” Aziraphale said, his voice muffled by the inside of the cabinet. Then he suddenly pulled back and stared at Crowley.  
  
“What?” Crowley asked.  
  
“Your memories date back to sometime in early February of 1481, correct?” Aziraphale asked.  
  
“Yes?” He hoped Aziraphale didn’t want an exact date, because all he was certain of was that it was some time after the 6th.  
  
“And you haven’t so much as gone north of Hadrian’s Wall since it was still manned by Romans, correct?” Aziraphale asked.  
  
“No, I think I would remember that.” It was an absolutely miserable journey, up to Albany or Scotland, or whatever it was now.  
  
“Then, in essence, you’ve never had single malt scotch whisky before,” Aziraphale declared, sounding positively giddy.  
  
“No?” It didn’t sound familiar at least. “It’s good, I take it?”  
  
“I keep nothing less than _excellent_ whisky, thank you very much,” Aziraphale informed him primly. He reached back into the cabinet and emerged with a bottle of something enticingly amber brown and a beaming smile that did funny things to Crowley’s chest. He grabbed two glasses off the rack that hung over the sink and sat down across from him, still beaming. “And now, I get to watch you take your first sip.”  
  
He poured out two measures of whisky into the glasses, and slid one over to him. He watched intently, still grinning, as Crowley took his glass.  
  
“Here’s to the world,” Crowley said, holding up his glass in cheers.  
  
“And to us,” Aziraphale said.  
  
Crowley was going to blame the unfamiliar alcohol on the way he choked.

* * *

Single malt scotch whisky was very good and he enjoyed it greatly.  
  
Other facts about himself that he’d learned: they were currently in London, which had still been called Lundenwic when last he’d been here. He’d lived in London for some centuries, and Aziraphale had been here longer, give or take the odd decade spent in China or Brazil (Aziraphale didn't explain either of these places, and while Crowley had a good guess about China, Brazil he couldn't picture at all). This particular neighborhood was called Soho, and Aziraphale had opened up the bookshop here back in 1800. Crowley had a property in Mayfair, which was a nearby neighborhood, but he was rarely there these days- no shop, just a flat, which was now mostly empty.  
  
The metal things on the road were called cars, and also automobiles, and also, back in the day, “horseless carriages”. Crowley himself owned one: it was called a Bentley, and it was currently parked outside of the cottage they’d just left. It would be fine, Aziraphale assured him: after over a century of a kind of demonic possession, driving through a ring of hellfire, and being resurrected by the Anti Christ, the thing was pretty much fully sapient and able to look after itself.  
  
Aziraphale didn’t tell him that he cared about the Bentley, but it was obvious without being directly said. Crowley understood. He was half in love the moment he heard the word “horseless”, and by the time Aziraphale told him how fast it went he was a goner.  
  
“So. The Antichrist,” Crowley said. “Perfectly normal, happy boy.”  
  
“Well, he’s an adult now,” Aziraphale pointed out. “But yes, he’s quite a splendid young man.”  
  
“How did that work?” Crowley asked.  
  
“It’s a long story,” Aziraphale said again, getting up to get another bottle. He was wobbling only slightly- Crowley supposed his tolerance for alcohol had increased over the years. “Please keep in mind that it would have been worse if we’d been at all competent before the very end.”  
  
One long and convoluted tale of really staggering incompetence, two and a half bottles of whiskey, and a very earnest apology for a fight he couldn’t remember having later, Crowley was on the floor in tears.  
  
“You asked the assembled Lords of Hell for a rubber duck?” Crowley asked, fairly rolling around. He only had a vague impression of what a rubber duck was in this context, but some things didn’t really require a perfect translation to be funny.  
  
“And the Archangel Michael for a towel. Surprised her so much she actually miracled one up,” Aziraphale repeated gleefully.  
  
“Were they scared?” Crowley asked.  
  
“Terrified,” Aziraphale said. “Absolutely petrified of you, I made sure of it.”  
  
Crowley sniggered, trying to picture Beelzebub in a state of terror. Or Dagon. Or Hastur, or-  
  
Well. Ligur was dead. Really, properly dead, and Crowley had been the one to kill him. That was just fucking weird.  
  
“Here’s to us!” Crowley said, raising his glass rather than thinking about it. “We pulled off the greatest con of all time!”  
  
“Cheers!” Aziraphale replied. They clinked glasses, and drank.  
  
“There is- I- so many questions. Still. Just, so many.” Crowley giggled. Aziraphale sat down next to him, and refilled his glass. He stayed sitting, his thigh very, very close to Crowley’s head.  
  
“How did we become friends?” He blurted out.  
  
“That,” Aziraphale replied. He was very obviously drunk, and then, he was suddenly quite sober. “That is a question with a complicated answer.”  
  
He thought about it, for long enough that Crowley was beginning to really regret having asked.  
  
“It’s not complicated because of you,” Aziraphale said quickly when he caught sight of Crowley’s face. “You’ve been really extraordinarily patient and constant. I just took a very long while to catch up.” He frowned down at his glass, which refilled itself. He drank.  
  
“I suppose,” Aziraphale said after another moment to think. “That it became a more formalized thing right after the Inquisition.”  
  
“Formalized?”  
  
Aziraphale let out a little annoyed huff. “It’s- you must understand. I cared for you, before that. For a long time before when your memories currently end, I cared for you. It’s just that the implications of that terrified me, and even without that, I’m occasionally rather rubbish at showing it.”  
  
“Really?” Crowley asked. He’d hoped, of course. Of course he had. He’d just never actually had proof before, and hadn’t wanted to risk the whole lack of smiting thing by asking for it.  
  
Aziraphale shrugged, smiling slightly. “Not terribly long ago you told me that you thought the whole English national character being one of emotional repression was down to the fact that I’d lived here for so long that they started mimicking me. And you were teasing, but I’m not sure you were wrong.”  
  
“Oh,” Crowley said, for lack of anything intelligent to say.  
  
“At any rate we entered into The Arrangement shortly after this whole nasty business with the Inquisition,” Aziraphale said. “Because of the Inquisition, even.”  
  
“How?” Crowley said, his face wrinkling.  
  
“Well,” Aziraphale said. “Just- I’m not proud of this- but when I heard from Heaven that you were stirring up trouble in Spain and that I should get a move on, I went, and while I didn’t believe the Inquisition to be your handiwork for a moment, I also didn’t think you would much care.”  
  
Crowley blinked at him.  
  
“It was hardly the first time you’d gotten a commendation for something you hadn’t done,” Aziraphale explained, not quite looking at him. “And you never _seemed_ to care before. You just- you treated it as a sort of free holiday. You had this sort of attitude about it. _Oh, I got this for just being in the area. Didn’t have to lift a finger, and now it’ll be months before they’re on my case again_. That sort of thing.”  
  
“That does sound like me,” Crowley admitted.

“It didn’t hit me until- well, much later than the Inquisition that you must have been putting on a brave face for at least some of those commendations,” Aziraphale continued. “And when I arrived in Seville, I didn’t have the slightest inkling of it until I found you on the floor of that tavern.”  
  
“Yeah, that’s about where my memory cuts out,” Crowley said.  
  
“Oh!” Aziraphale said, sounding surprised. “Yes, I suppose it must be.”  
  
“Must?”  
  
“Our reports would have lined up- because we wrote them together, but I don’t think they’ve worked that out yet. We said that we had a confrontation at Seville- by which I mean that I tried to persuade you to get off the floor and only managed it because I threatened to start chanting in Hebrew-”  
  
“Chanting in- are you nuts?” Crowley spluttered.  
  
“No, just very desperate to get you somewhere private so you could recover,” Aziraphale told him. “And it worked. Then we said we had a fight- by which I mean that we ended up in your house, with you too drunk to sober up all at once, and had a philosophical discussion about whether it was more the fault of the apple that humanity could do this sort of thing, or the fault of that blasted sword of mine-”  
  
“What.”  
  
“I still don’t know which of us did the right thing,” Aziraphale confessed with a small, helpless laugh. “Sometimes I think neither of us did. Sometimes I think it was both.”  
  
“Is that possible?”  
  
“Stranger things have happened. More things than dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy, that’s for certain,” Aziraphale replied. It sounded like a quote, but Crowley didn’t recognize it.  
  
“At any rate, we reported that I drove you out of town- in a stagecoach, which I’d bought and then did end up driving myself because you’re hopeless behind the reins of a horse and I didn’t trust any of the humans to be around you in your state- and then we reported that you gave me the slip at the Port of Huelva. In reality, I saw you off to a ship to Portugal- you ended up in Porto for the next little while- and then I took a ship to Greece. We had everyone in Heaven thinking you’d slipped off to the Ottoman Empire, while everyone in Hell was celebrating your cunning.”  
  
“So they must have cut off my memories at about the time we would have met again,” Crowley realized. “Because as far as they know, we had a huge fight when we met up in Seville, and I was primed and ready for that, and not… moping about on the floor.”  
  
“You were always a better person than anyone would give you credit for,” Aziraphale said, like you might describe the sun as hot. He really needed to stop doing that if he didn't want Crowley to discorporate. “Including, very often, me, but after that… it seemed very silly to deny that we could work together effectively. So we came to an Arrangement. I scratch your back, you scratch mine… we’d generally meet up somewhere to discuss things, and that very quickly became a habit of going out to eat, and then it was dinner and a show, and then dinner and a show and back to the shop for a bottle of something good…”  
  
“So we became friends,” Crowley said.  
  
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, smiling. “Yes, we did.”

* * *

Not too terribly long after that there was a sudden vibration from Crowley’s bottom.  
  
“What is- what?” Crowley said, leaping up. The vibration continued. “What?”  
  
Aziraphale looked momentarily confused before his expression brightened. “Oh! That’s your mobile!”  
  
“My what?”  
  
“Your mobile phone, it’s in your back pocket,” Aziraphale informed him as he stood. Then he reached out and took the little vibrating rectangle out of his back pocket, which was _right on top of Crowley’s arse_.  
  
“Ejguagvee?” Crowley asked, meaning roughly _Is this a thing now? Do people casually touch their friends on the butt?_  
  
It wouldn’t be the most invasive custom, to be sure. There had been plenty of parties in Rome that sort of required letting people touch your dick with their dick, for example. But that didn’t seem right, for the customs of a country that apparently had taken their cues from Aziraphale from how to deal with their emotions. Aziraphale didn’t strike him as someone to casually reach out and touch your butt.  
  
Aziraphale _hadn’t_ struck him as such, at least. The evidence to the contrary was still vibrating in his hands as he frowned down at it.  
  
“I’ve just realized that I normally rely on you to deal with modern technology, and that’s going to make things very difficult,” Aziraphale said. He jabbed his finger at the mobile, to no apparent effect. “Hmm.”  
  
“Modern technology?” Crowley asked.  
  
“Humanity found its way back to indoor heating and plumbing, and I just got very comfortable and didn’t really bother keeping up with things after that,” Aziraphale explained. “Ah well, I guess one more frivolous miracle won’t give too much away.”  
  
“We have _plumbing_?” Crowley asked.  
  
“Yes, we do!” Aziraphale said, smiling. He flicked a finger, and what Crowley had previously thought was some kind of utility hook over the wash basin turned out to be a faucet. Crowley walked over to it, and poked his hand under the streaming of running water.  
  
“It’s warm,” Crowley said wonderingly.  
  
“Yes, you can adjust the temperature by turning the knobs at either side of tap,” Aziraphale said. “There used to be separate taps for hot and cold, but then around the 1990s you broke in and put a mixer tap in, which I must concede is a great deal more convenient.”  
  
“Why are you explain the plumbing to Crowley?” came a voice Crowley didn’t recognize, and couldn’t find the corresponding person no matter where he looked.  
  
“It’s the mobile, dear. Humans use them to keep in touch over long distances,” Aziraphale explained, pointing to his mobile.  
  
“Plumbing and the phone,” said the voice, apparently mobilly. “Did he hit his head really hard?”  
  
Aziraphale snorted bitterly. “Beelzebub hit his head really hard,” he explained. “They took his memories all the way back to the back on the 15th century.”  
  
“ _Beelzebub_ did this?” Crowley demanded, whirling away from the sink.  
  
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, looking a little embarrassed.  
  
The voice in the mobile laughed. “Did this just happen five minutes ago?”  
  
“Not quite,” Aziraphale admitted, blushing furiously. “We were at the cottage, trying to get things ready for the movers when we were ambushed. More like… five hours ago, perhaps?”  
  
The voice laughed even harder.  
  
“Right, well. Introductions. Crowley, this is Adam, and Adam, this is Crowley from 1481,” Aziraphale held out the mobile to him. There on the flip side of it was a very familiar looking face.  
  
“Gah!” Crowley cried, leaping back.  
  
Aziraphale looked confused. “It’s not- it’s like the picture, Crowley, it’s just- it’s how people normally communicate these days. Or so you always tell me, at least.”  
  
Crowley looked between the angel (confused and a little worried) and the picture framed in the mobile (who was squinting at him a little). When the scene refused to dissolve into the revelation that Hell had found out that he hadn’t had a thing to do with the Inquisition after all and had dragged him back down for a few decades of torture, Crowley allowed himself to take a deep breath.  
  
“I’ve asked you before, if I look like him. You know, the bio dad,” Adam said, after a moment. “You always change the subject.”  
  
“ _Oh_ ,” Aziraphale said softly.  
  
“Right, I’m not sure why I wouldn’t answer you before, but: yeah, you look disturbingly like your infernal father,” Crowley told him, before tilting his head up towards Aziraphale. “You didn’t know?”  
  
“I never met him,” Aziraphale said. “Or, well. I _saw_ him, on the day Armageddon failed to go off but he didn’t look particularly human then.”  
  
“Right,” Crowley said, inching closer to the mobile.  
  
After the physical world began to manifest- someone had since decided to call it day number three, but as time hadn’t been invented yet he didn’t really think that was right- some of the angels began to craft bodies for themselves to explore the new plane of existence with. Many chose animals. And then, when the last big project the Almighty had lined up was revealed, many began to pattern themselves after the humans who had not quite yet come into being too.  
  
Adam did look an awful lot like the form Lucifer had chosen, but there were differences: not quite the same colored eyes, not quite the same nose, a little bit of baby fat still clinging to his cheeks that Lucifer would never have thought to give himself. He’d never have thought to make his hair go all flopsy like that either.  
  
“Right,” Crowley said again. “So you’re the Antichrist that wasn’t, then?”  
  
“That’s me,” Adam confirmed cheerfully. “And now I’m studying law with a concentration in environmental justice.”  
  
“I have no idea what those words mean in that combination, but I’m glad you’re having fun?” Crowley told him.  
  
Adam frowned. “Is it permanent, do you think?” he asked.  
  
“Probably,” Crowley said, at the same time Aziraphale said “I don’t think so.”  
  
“You don’t?” Crowley asked him. “Why?”  
  
“Well, for one thing, you’re speaking 21st century British English, not 15th century Andalusian Spanish, and you have been since you woke up,” Aziraphale said.  
  
“Good point,” Crowley admitted.  
  
“For another… it’s patchy, but you’ve developed some habits in the past five hundred years, and you’ve been falling into a few of them without thinking.”  
  
“I have?”  
  
“You put your glasses in their usual spot, you sat in your usual chair, and once you'd had the first two glasses you drank the scotch in your usual manner as well,” Aziraphale said.  
  
“Oh.” The fact that Aziraphale apparently knew him better than he currently knew himself was doing funny things to him.  
  
“I also remember reading about a few cases of people’s memories being removed by demons,” Aziraphale added. “While this is not exactly the same situation, generally speaking the memories were not gone, but suppressed until something triggered their return.”  
  
“So what’s the trigger, then?” Crowley asked. “Do we know?”  
  
“At a guess… probably you murdering me,” Aziraphale said with a wince.  
  
“Well I’m not doing that!” Crowley protested.  
  
“I know that. Beelzebub didn’t. They expected you to be a loyal soldier of Hell.” Aziraphale said. “They’ve gotten a bit better about gloating over the years, unfortunately, but I still got the impression that their plan was for you to kill me, and then have your memories of our current relationship return while you were standing over my corpse with an unholy blade.”  
  
“Maximum cruelty,” Crowley said softly. “Yeah, that sounds like them.”  
  
“At any rate, I was going to wait until Anathema returned, and get a second opinion before trying to poke about with your memories,” Aziraphale said. He sighed and looked down at the mobile. The picture was facing away from him still- Crowley wondered if Adam could see him, or if it was like someone speaking behind you. “Any word there?”  
  
“That’s what I was calling about, actually,” Adam said. “She called Newt- she’s fine, her family is fine, their home is fine, even, which just means that they’ve got the whole town squeezed in under their roof.”  
  
“Oh good,” Aziraphale said, though he neither looked nor sounded please. “Well I’m glad to hear that everyone is well.”  
  
“Ophelia trashed the roads leading down from her family’s part of the mountains, and from the sound of things the closest airport is out too,” Adam continued. “She doesn’t think she’ll be able to leave for a few weeks at least.”  
  
Aziraphale frowned. “A few weeks.”  
  
“Yeah. Sounds like.”  
  
Aziraphale sighed again.  
  
“So we have to wait a few weeks before I can start remembering the last five hundred years?” Crowley asked. “At best?”  
  
“I can do some research on my own,” Aziraphale said. “But I would prefer not to do something as delicate as try to restore your memories without seeking a second opinion, and unfortunately, Anathema is person most knowledgeable on the subject of the occult who is also least likely to kill us.”  
  
“So. A few weeks then. Doesn’t sound too bad.” He regretted the words the moment they were out of his mouth.  
  
“Knock on wood,” Aziraphale said, reaching out and rapping his knuckles against the kitchen table.  
  
“So. You said you were ambushed at the cottage?” Adam said. “Do you want us to go swing down there and pick your things up? Pepper can borrow her parents’ van no problem.”  
  
“Best to not, I think,” Aziraphale said quickly. “The cottage is almost certainly being watched, if it hasn’t been outright destroyed by the forces of Hell.”  
  
“I can set up a google alert for it?” Adam offered. “See if anyone gets to talking about a cottage being set on fire or something?”  
  
From the look on his face Aziraphale didn’t understand what a google alert was any more than he did. “You do that. We’ll have to discuss whether or not it’s worth it to try and collect our things from it when Crowley’s memories are restored. Thankfully, the only item of sentimental value we brought with us was the Bentley, and I honestly expect it will drive itself back to the lot behind the shop in the next day or so.”  
  
“I’ll let you know if anything changes,” Adam said.  
  
“Thank you. We’ll do the same. Your phone recognizes my landline still, correct? Crowley’s phone is going to be iffy, as neither one of us currently knows how to operate it.”  
  
“Yes, it does,” Adam confirmed. “Well, bye then.”  
  
“Goodbye, Adam,” Aziraphale said, and after a moment Adam’s picture disappeared from the mobile, to be replaced with a picture of the two of them not unlike the one next to the till. Before Crowley could get a better look at it, Aziraphale placed it face down on the table and pinched the bridge of his nose, hunching in on himself.  
  
“Aziraphale?”  
  
“I’m sorry, it’s just- it’s just hitting me that we’re going to have to go house hunting again,” Aziraphale said. “I know- I know you don’t remember, but it was really a stroke of good fortune, finding that cottage. It had a marvelous view of the sea, a little path down to the beach, space for a garden, space for library… there was even an apple tree out front. It really felt like a place that was meant for _us_.”  
  
“That was _our_ cottage?” Crowley asked.  
  
“Oh!” Aziraphale seemed to startle himself straight. “Oh, yes. I mean, yes. We. We wanted a place to be able to- to get away from it all, you know.” He laughed. It sounded very strained.  
  
So, a safe house, then. Because the forces of Heaven and Hell wanted them dead. Crowley nodded, taking it in as much stride as he could.  
  
“Who’s Ophelia?” he asked.  
  
“I beg your pardon?”  
  
“Ophelia. She trashed the witch’s place, Adam said. I don’t know any demon by that name. One of yours?”  
  
“Oh goodness me,” Aziraphale said. “You’ve forgotten Hamlet.”  
  
“Who?”  
  
“It’s a long story,” Aziraphale said. “And not actually relevant to your question, so I’ll tell you later. The humans have taken to naming the really big storms, particularly hurricanes and typhoons. Ophelia is the name of the hurricane that hit Puerto Rico a few days ago. Anathema was visiting family there when it suddenly veered away from the Bahamas. We offered to miracle her a seat on a flight, but as we have to presume that our former offices are keeping track of our miracles even though they don’t seem willing or able to cut us off she declined. It’s best that they only have the vaguest of ideas as to where our friends are. So, she’s stuck, and we’re now a bit stuck without her.”  
  
Crowley nodded, absorbing all that information as best he could. Aziraphale was on first name terms with a witch. The witch was from Puerto Rico, which meant she was back in Spain somewhere, he guessed. Funny how these things went around, wasn’t it?  
  
“Flight?” he asked finally.  
  
“Oh! The humans learned to fly!” Aziraphale told him.  
  
“What? Like, that thing Leonardo was working on-”  
  
“Oh no, much bigger. Aeroplanes, they’re called, planes for short. They can seat hundreds, nowadays. You can fly clear across the world if you’re willing to make a few stops along the way. Oh! And outer space! The humans are in space now too, though only as far out to the moon thus far, and that’s not an option available to the general public just yet.”  
  
“WHAT?”

* * *

For most of the afternoon, Aziraphale walked him through all the humans exploring space that he no longer remembered: from heliocentrism and Galileo Galilei through Sputnik and Neil Armstrong, all the way through to SETI and the ISS.  
  
“They’ve really come a long way,” Aziraphale said enthusiastically, plying him with large books full of very finely detailed pictures of the cosmos that were, apparently, Crowley’s property. “And those telescopes get better and better with every passing day, or so it seems. There’s even some serious talk about setting up a colony of sorts on Mars.”  
  
“How would they manage that?” Crowley asked. They’d decided against making Mars inhabitable fairly late in the game. They’d had to stop the core and blow all the atmosphere away, and anything more complex than bacteria had needed to be relocated.  
  
“Oh, Wensley- that’s one of Adam’s friends, Wensleydale, he’s the one who defeated Famine- is working on that. There’s some kind of special accelerated program he’s in, and he just contributed to a fairly well-received book about how to go about doing that… I think I have that on the salesfloor, actually, hold tight.”  
  
He made to go back into the shop part of the shop, before turning around and pulling out a book from the stack in front of Crowley. “Here,” he said, handing it to him directly. “This has some of your favorite pictures the humans have taken of your work. Fair warning, they’ve colorized them, so they don’t look quite right- but the effect is actually quite stunning!”  
  
He hurried off, leaving Crowley to quietly absorb the fact that at some point he’d talked to Aziraphale about what he’d done in Heaven before the Fall, and that he’d done so long enough ago that whatever weirdness Aziraphale felt over the fact that he used to be a seraph had faded. He opened the book mainly to have something to do with his hands, and then let out a long, low whistle.  
  
“These are gorgeous! We should have made them colored!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know how we would have done that- maybe found some way to introduce more heavy metals into the coronas…”  
  
He trailed off when he realized that there were eyes on him. Aziraphale had returned, and was leaning against the entryway to the kitchen, looking at him with a fond little smile on his face.  
  
“What?” Crowley asked, fighting down a blush.  
  
“Oh!” Aziraphale said, shaking himself upright. “Oh, it’s nothing. Well, not nothing, it’s just- that’s the very same tear you went on the first time we went to a full-color planetarium show.”  
  
“It was, like, three sentences,” Crowley said, after a moment to tell his circulation system that he would shut it off if it kept trying to make him blush. “That’s not really a tear.”  
  
“The beginning of the same tear, then,” Aziraphale corrected himself. “And here’s Wensley’s book.”  
  
The book was called _Greening Mars_. Crowley barely spared it a glance before searching for something else to talk about.  
  
“Full-color?” he asked.  
  
As a change in topic, it worked spectacularly.  
  
“You don’t remember the cinema!” Aziraphale said beaming gloriously, his entire face lighting up.  
  
As something that would make Aziraphale stop looking at him like that it failed spectacularly.  
  
“You know that I don’t,” Crowley told him.  
  
“Yes, but you love the films!” Aziraphale said, clapping his hands together in delight. “And I have a home entertainment system now. And I know how to use it! Oh, come along, dearest, I know you’ll enjoy this.”  
  
He nearly skipped into the sitting room, leaving Crowley to mouth _dearest_ in relative dignity.  
  
After a moment, he put the space book back on top of the pile of space books and followed Aziraphale into the sitting room.  
  
“There’s one film series you particularly enjoy, it’s been going for a while now,” Aziraphale explained. “We couldn’t catch most of them together when it was in the cinema, but we’ve watched some of the older ones on here since, and you've promised to take me to the new Idris Elba ones. Anyway, I’ve always wondered what your reaction to seeing them the first time was. I guess now I get to find out.”  
  
“Cinema,” Crowley repeated, as Aziraphale bustled around something that looked like a dark rectangle that had been in the room he’d woken up in. “Can you explain what that is?”  
  
“It’s a sort of public theater, but for viewing films,” Aziraphale explained. “Not all of the films go to cinema before being released for home consumption these days, but many do, particularly big budget productions such as these. You like the special effects- all the explosions and car chases and such.”  
  
“Okay,” Crowley said. “And we couldn’t go to them together because...”  
  
“Oh, well,” Aziraphale seemed to dim a bit. “That’s- well. Hell, basically. They latched on to all the latest forms of communication in order to, well, communicate. With you, and I suppose anyone else who was up here at the time. The used the radio in the Bentley right up until the end, but otherwise moved on to television around 1970 or so, and then when the Internet took off they started using home computers, and from the moment they have sound, they used films, whether they were being viewed in public or not. They can see you when it’s a screen. It would have taken a lot to explain why you were sitting nicely next to me.”  
  
“Oh,” Crowley said. “Is that why you avoid modern technology?”  
  
Aziraphale spun around so sharply that something expensive sounding got knocked onto the floor and shattered. He stared at Crowley, looking very startled.  
  
“What?” Crowley asked.  
  
“I… hadn’t thought you’d put that together,” Aziraphale admitted nearly wringing his hands. “It’s just- well. I’ve seen how Hell gives their instructions. It always seemed so unpleasant. Invasive. Not to mention the way they would talk to you! I figured- well. There should have been some place where they would have had trouble reaching you, so I. I made one.”  
  
Crowley had been thinking that Aziraphale had stopped keeping up with the times to stop Hell from spying on him. He hadn’t budgeted emotionally for this.  
  
He hadn’t budgeted emotionally for anything that was happening today, but this was a limit he hadn’t known he had.  
  
“They can’t get through now. The wards are too strong- we couldn’t do that earlier. It would have given everything away, if they’d tried to reach you only to be blocked by angelic warding with any degree of regularity,” Aziraphale assured him quickly, rambling on with a nervous sort of energy. “And it wasn’t a great hardship or anything! The pace of technology these days is really far too much for me to keep pace with, and I truly am quite comfortable with just the basics. I have a wireless from before I realized that they used them to communicate with you, but it was no issue to unplug it and put it away whenever I wasn’t using it. I’ve been to the cinema plenty by now and it turns out I really do prefer live performances. This whole home entertainment system with the big screen and the streaming is really quite nifty, but aside from the cooking shows I only ever use it to watch things with you anyway, so no loss there. Hell only ever came through on computers that are hooked up to the Internet, so I was able to use my old computer from the pre-Internet days to work out my taxes. I didn’t know what I was missing with the whole online shopping phenomena, but you did, and you kept your eye out for anything I would have missed and bought it for me, so that’s also a wash. I concede that audiobooks are quite the invention, but I don't think I'll ever quite be comfortable with an e-book reader while there are still physical paper books to read. And I know I should get a mobile, but I have to admit the idea of having something on me that allows others to call me at any given time fills me with a kind of dread, so I’d probably just have it turned off more often than not anyway.” He shrugged, having apparently run out of modern devices Hell used to commune with him.  
  
Crowley was not nodding so much as he was bobbing his head very slightly up and down. He was beginning to make himself seasick, doing that, so he stopped.  
  
“Crowley?” Aziraphale prodded after a moment. “Can you say something, perhaps? Please?”  
  
“I don’t know what to say,” Crowley said, slumping against the settee. “I don’t-”  
  
He knew what he wanted to say. _Six thousand years later, and you’re still looking for ways to keep the rain off me._ But that seemed a bit much. Even for this new whatever they apparently had between them.  
  
Though, it wasn’t new for Aziraphale, was it? It was innate. Established. It was an intrinsic part of their interactions with one another, something that dictated that they drink and laugh and even touch one another now, without reserve, as the very best of friends on a side all their own.  
  
This was all way, way beyond what he’d ever thought he would have. He had no idea, still, after all of Aziraphale’s explanations, what he’d done to get here, but he knew that if he didn’t get a grip he’d spoil it.  
  
“We haven’t discussed this, you said,” Crowley managed.  
  
“We haven’t discussed a lot of things, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale admitted. “We spent six thousand years working for opposites sides, there’s a lot of ground to cover. And, well. We saved the world. We’ve been enjoying it, for the most part, still having a world to do things in.” He snapped, and whatever it was that had fallen to floor reconstituted itself and returned to its place in the cabinet.  
  
“Makes sense,” Crowley said.  
  
“Speaking of enjoyment,” Aziraphale said, seemingly glad to change the subject. “Popcorn is traditionally considered the food of choice for film viewing, but I did have some things set aside for a picnic we won't be able to get to now that we should probably eat. Do you think you can eat?”  
  
“I can certainly try?” Crowley offered.  
  
Aziraphale beamed. He was doing a lot of that these days, apparently. “Excellent. I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”  
  
He returned a moment later with a tray that he set down on the table in front of the settee. He sat down himself, picked up a small rectangle, and began to press buttons. The large black rectangle suddenly brightened, and let out a loud chime.  
  
“Okay,” Crowley said, sitting down next to him. Aziraphale didn’t react, too busy squinting at the large black rectangle as he manipulated the buttons on the small one.  
  
“Sponge cake and stuffed eggs?” Crowley asked after a moment of watching Aziraphale somehow use the small rectangle to write J-A-M-E on the large one.  
  
“Hmm?” Aziraphale replied, distracted with adding the letter S. “Oh! Oh, well, that’s a bit of a joke.”  
  
“It is?”  
  
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, turning away from the rectangles. “You see, this type of sponge cake is called angel’s food cake. And while there is a corresponding devil’s food cake, you don’t enjoy sweets quite like I do, so I made what are now called deviled eggs instead.”  
  
Explanation provided, he turned back to the rectangles, leaving Crowley to regard the food with bemusement.  
  
“Well, far be it from me to turn down one of my former boss’ eggs,” he drawled.  
  
“CroWLEY!” Aziraphale nearly shrieked, a scandalized flush creeping up his neck.  
  
Crowley smirked, and popped one of the eggs into his mouth in reply.

* * *

They watched the film- called _Dr. No_ after the villain of the piece- for some given value of the term ‘watch’. Neither one of them paid very much attention to the large rectangle, which was apparently known as a screen. Every time Crowley so much as glanced in his direction, Aziraphale would turn to him and take off on some tangent, hands moving excitedly through the air, beaming at him like there was nowhere he’d rather be than sitting next to him, filling him in on things like how the films differed from the books, what was going on when the film had first been released, a bit about the author of the books, and how they’d met him once, as coworkers.  
  
“This was during the Second World War,” Aziraphale said.  
  
“The Second _what_?”  
  
“Oh dear,” Aziraphale had said, and pressed something to make the film stop for a time.  
  
Aziraphale skimped on a lot of the details, but it was obvious that, as their name implied, the World Wars were pretty horrific. The first one had been utterly terrible- it had involved something called mustard gas and apparently trenches had gotten worse over the years- and Crowley had fought in it, on Hell’s orders. Aziraphale, who hadn’t been given any direction from Heaven as to what to do and had a corporation that looked just old enough not to be drafted, had worked in a manor house than had been converted into a hospital instead. All in all, a good forty million people died during that first war.  
  
The second one, apparently, had been even worse.  
  
“You got credit for starting it,” Aziraphale said. “You’d been in Germany when their dictator, Adolf Hitler, took power. I’m pretty sure you were just enjoying yourself in Berlin’s cabaret scene, but Hitler certainly seemed demonic enough and you were in the area, so. They gave you a commendation for his rise to power, and then several more for the ensuing atrocities.”  
  
“I don’t want to know what that means, do I?” Crowley asked.  
  
“No,” Aziraphale said flatly. “I’ll tell you if you ask, but I can assure you that you’ll be much happier not knowing.”  
  
Crowley opened his mouth to ask anyway.  
  
“Let me put it this way: I hadn’t seen you that drunk since the Spanish Inquisition, and then I saw you that drunk every other month for nearly four years,” Aziraphale added.  
  
Crowley closed his mouth. He considered taking a drink, but the one provided was something nonalcoholic and fizzy and he couldn’t figure out how he was supposed to drink it without it going up his nose.  
  
“How bad did it get?” he asked instead. “The Spanish Inquisition.”  
  
“It’s hard to get decent numbers,” Aziraphale said. “Records weren’t well kept, or else were destroyed. There was another religious schism, and England was on the other end of it from Catholicism, so much of the English-language material made it out to be worse than it was.” He hesitated, and then said, clearly hedging “The most reliable sources I’ve seen place the number of people executed by the Spanish Inquisition in the thousands, and the number of people sentenced to some form of punishment in the tens of thousands- up over one hundred thousand, actually. It didn’t actually end until 1834, though it wasn’t particularly active by that point. It closed down on July 15th, 1834, if memory serves. I took you out to lunch. We got rather spectacularly drunk in a celebratory manner.”  
  
“How far over one hundred thousand?” Crowley asked.  
  
Again, Aziraphale hesitated. “Roughly one hundred and fifty thousand, is the generally agreed upon number for the Spanish Inquisition.”  
  
“Shit,” Crowley said, leaning back against the arm of the settee. “Just. Shit.”  
  
There would have been more- more people tried. Tortured, and then found innocent. He’d seen it. That first auto-da-fé. All those people being paraded around in sackcloth, the innocent grovelling before their neighbors in gratitude for being spared the public penance of the lash and worse.  
  
There would have been more deaths than just the official tally, too. People whose hearts gave out under the strain of being tortured, people who would later die of infections. Suicides, too.  
  
Crowley’s memories only held six. The first six deaths of thousands, and every informant, torturer, and executioner damned for it another little notch in his demonic bedpost. Well done him. Small wonder they’d given him an award, if that was how things were going to go.  
  
“It’s not your fault,” Aziraphale said, gently yet firmly. “They come up with the worst ideas on their own, just as they come up with the best ones.”  
  
Crowley didn’t know what to say about that, so he just nodded. It seemed to be enough. After a moment, Aziraphale picked up the small rectangle, and the film resumed.  
  
A few minutes later, when Crowley next tried to sneak a look at him, Aziraphale turned to him, smiled, and rambled on about the difficulties he imagined there would be in filming in a guano quarry, and inadvertently informing Crowley of what guano was in the process.  
  
It was...weird. Really weird. Not the guano- though, yes, the guano, a little bit- but the fact that Aziraphale kept looking back at him. Crowley had literal thousands of years worth of experience looking at Aziraphale without him catching on. When did he start noticing? When did it start making him smile and engage in conversation?  
  
Was this really his life now? Did he regularly spend time sitting next to Aziraphale, with a film playing before them that they would happily disregard in favor of conversation?  
  
No Hell to report back to. No Heaven guiding Aziraphale’s every action. No Apocalypse looming ahead of them. They could just be, if they wanted, and apparently Aziraphale did want to spend time with him.  
  
How was it that this was his life? It didn’t feel like his life, and he was pretty sure that it wasn’t just down to the missing memories. Something was off here. Something just didn’t add up…  
  
The next thing he knew, the film screen had gone dark and Aziraphale was shaking him gently on the shoulder.  
  
“Huzzayut?” he asked intelligently.  
  
“You fell asleep, dear,” Aziraphale said.  
  
“What?” Crowley asked. “Why?”  
  
“Well, it’s been a long day and you underwent a very invasive demonic miracle quite against your will,” Aziraphale said. “I imagine you’re tired.”  
  
“But why?” Crowley demanded. “We don’t need to sleep.”  
  
Aziraphale blinked at him. Then he laughed.  
  
“What?” Crowley asked.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said, gone a bit pink in the face. “It’s- you got into the habit of sleeping every night, apparently far more recently than I’d presumed.”  
  
“What?” Crowley asked again. Sure, he liked his naps, but… “Every night?”  
  
“More or less,” Aziraphale told him. “You can go longer, of course, but it takes effort, and after the sort of day you’ve had it might be for the best to rest up a bit. Recover your strength.”  
  
“Uh. Sure?” Though he’s not sure how that was going to be accomplished. Aziraphale had mentioned rooms of some kind in that nearby neighborhood, but he’d also said that they were pretty much empty. Aziraphale didn’t just wake him up only to send him to sleep on the same bloody settee he’s currently on, did he?  
  
“You keep a bed upstairs,” Aziraphale said, standing up. Crowley hadn’t quite realized that his hand had still been on his shoulder the whole time until it was gone. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

* * *

Crowley might have moaned when flopped down on the bed. _Might._ Just a little bit.

“Is this what a bed feels like these days?” Crowley asked wonderingly. Satan, no wonder he slept every night. His only question right now was why he would ever get up.

The probable answer to that question was busy bustling around the chest of drawers, clearly looking for something. “Not all of them, no. This is actually quite a luxury item. It’s made with some sort of special foam, and there’s some sort of mechanism inside that firms or softens it as desired, as well as heating it up… there’s even a massage function.”

“How?” Crowley asked.

“I honestly don’t know,” Aziraphale admitted. “I just know that you paid an exorbitant sum for it. I’m not sure your Bentley is worth that much, to be frank.”

“Did I get a commendation for this?” Crowley asked. “Because I should have. This isn’t a bed, it’s a _sin_. This is sloth incarnate.”

“If you say so,” Aziraphale replied, turning around. He held out a small bundle of clothes. “Here. These are for sleeping.”

They were also very clearly Crowley’s: black and sleek. The socks even had snakes on them.

“The light turns off like so,” Aziraphale said, flicking the switch to demonstrate. “I’ll be downstairs if you need anything. Erm. Well. I’ll leave you to it. Sleep well, dear.”

He left. Crowley set the pajamas down on the bed, but he didn’t change into them, not just yet. Instead, he went snooping.

The drawers he went through first- it all his stuff, very obvious from the color pallette of blacks, dark greys, and the occasional red. The wardrobe was full of Aziraphale’s stuff: all hanging cream and tan suits like the one he was wearing now, and then shirts crisply folded, cufflinks and bowties all laid out at the ready. The closet was worse. They both kept their clothes in that, all mixed in together and rubbing elbows. Fancy clothes, he thought. Stuff they wouldn't wear on the regular.

There was some dusty old embroidered jacket that he knew was Aziraphale’s and gave him an intense feeling of mortification, for example. And there was a very little black dress studded with something metallic that was definitely Crowley's.

There was also a bag hanging up all the way in the back, nearly hidden beneath a horrendous fur coat. Something about it seemed significant, so he pulled it out, and pulled on the little tab to open it before he could remember that he really shouldn't know how to do that.

He shouldn’t know that it was his suit, either. It was midnight blue, and there was a length of silk he knew was a necktie in that cross hatched pattern Aziraphale was so fond of. Tartan. That was the name of it- the pattern. It was tartan, and Aziraphale loved it to pieces, and Crowley…

He sort of got the impression that he hated it, or at least pretended to. But he was also pretty sure that this was, indeed, his tie.

Suddenly quite sure that this suit shouldn’t be out in the open, he put it back in the bag (closing it proved to be slightly trickier than opening had been, but he managed) and put the fur coat back over it, and hung the whole thing up in the back of the closet again.

He changed clothes with a snap, and then sat down on the bed.

“We’re living together,” he told the empty room.

The empty room seemed to radiate bemused affirmation in reply, but that might have been Crowley projecting a bit.

“We’re living together,” he said again. It was even weirder the second time around. “We’re fellow lodgers. We’re bunking together. We share a flat. We’re _roomies_.” That last one was so weird that he started panicking, just a little bit. He flopped back on the (still sinfully comfortable) bed and took a deep breath.

Right, so. It wasn’t like Aziraphale hadn’t implied it. This was obviously not a new arrangement. It made sense, what with all the protections the bookshop had, and the fact that they were on both Heaven and Hell’s shit lists. He’d pretty much known that they must be living together, before he saw the clothes.

It was just that, before he saw the clothes, he’d assumed they had their own spaces, their own rooms, in the same building. It’s not like they couldn’t miracle the space on as needed.

… or maybe they couldn’t? Maybe that messed with the wards they had on the building?

He frowned at the closet, and then at the wardrobe. Aziraphale didn’t just like to buy his own clothing, he also liked to keep it, maintain it, and physically change into and out of it. How much of their time in Rome did Crowley spend torturing himself with trying not to peak as he waited for Aziraphale to strip down or dress back up on their way into or out of a bathhouse?

And now apparently he slept in the same room Aziraphale kept his clothes. Possibly the same room where he changed his clothes. Great! Great. This was fine.

“What are you playing at with this?” Crowley asked his reflection in the mirror on the back of the door.

His reflection made no reply, which was probably for the best.

Bereft of anything else that made sense, Crowley shimmied under the covers, and snapped the lights off. He fell asleep pretty much instantly.

He woke up a few hours later when someone sat down on the bed next to him. He probably would have had something to say about it- or possibly to throw at it- if somebody hadn’t been Aziraphale.

He’d taken off his jacket, and put on a pair of spectacles that Crowley knew he couldn’t possibly need. Crowley waited, but Aziraphale didn’t say anything to him. He just swung his legs up onto the bed, conjured a softly glowing ball of light, and opened a book.

Crowley waited. Aziraphale glanced down at him, smiled gently, and returned to his reading without saying a word. Crowley kept waiting, and then finally lost patience.

“Aziraphale,” he said. “What are you doing?”

“Hmm?” Aziraphale replied absently. Then suddenly his eyes grew comically wide behind his spectacles. “Oh goodness! I- I forgot!” He stood, and the ball of light disappeared. “I got so wrapped up with researching suppressed memories that I forgot that you didn’t- well. I’m terribly sorry dear.”

“You were researching how to restore my memories so hard that you forgot that I’m missing memories?” Crowley checked.

It was hard to tell in the dark of the room, but he was pretty sure that Aziraphale was blushing.

“Yes, well… yes, that’s more or less exactly what happened,” Aziraphale admitted.

“Is this normal for us? Do you often just… plop down next to me while I’m asleep and read?” Crowley asked.

“Well, it’s the very best seat in the house,” Aziraphale said, just a little defensively. "By far and away the most comfortable piece of furniture we own."

Crowley couldn’t argue with that logic. “That’s true, “ he said.

He waited. Aziraphale said nothing, just standing there next to the bed, looking awkward.

“You can- you can sit back down again, if you’d like,” Crowley said. He should be able to fall back asleep, eventually. He must do it all the time.

Aziraphale shook vigorously. “No, no, that’s quite all right, my dear, I’ll just-” he backed out of the room. “I’ll just go, and try to be a bit more mindful in the future. You rest up.”

And then he was gone, leaving Crowley to stare blankly up at the ceiling, wondering what the fuck was even going on.


	2. Chapter 2

“I’m terribly sorry to wake you, my dear, but the Archangel Gabriel is on our doorstep and I’m afraid he’s not going to budge until we have words.”  
  
Crowley had been dreaming of something when Aziraphale had walked into the room, he was certain of it. He couldn’t say what he’d been dreaming of, but he was pretty sure that it had _not_ involved the Archangel Gabriel.  
  
There was still a dreamlike surreality to laying in a comfortable bed, Aziraphale standing above him and wringing his hands apologetically as he explained that the Archangel fucking Gabriel wanted words.  
  
“Quelimahowhaa?” Crowley asked, not quite awake enough to make his tongue shape words.  
  
“The Archangel Gabriel is on our doorstep,” Aziraphale repeated. “He’s probably here because Beelzebub told him about yesterday’s excitement and he wants to see what the damage is for himself.”  
  
“Grlk,” said Crowley. Nope, words were still not happening.  
  
“If you could just put in an appearance and just… be generally yourself for a bit, that would probably persuade him that Beelzebub’s curse didn’t take. You don’t have to do much talking, just stand there and maybe chime in a bit from time to time. I’ll take point.”  
  
“Wait,” Crowley said, sitting up in bed. “Go back a bit. Beelzebub has Gabriel doing their errands now?”  
  
“Yes. Though he doesn’t seem especially aware of it,” Aziraphale said. “They have a ‘close working relationship’ which seems to consist, in large part, of Beelzebub sharing enough information with Gabriel to point him in whatever direction they wish him to be pointed in, and them begrudgingly doing him a few favors in return.”  
  
“Are you shitting me?” Crowley asked, though it was clear that he was not. He flopped back down on the bed with a sigh. “It’s too early to deal with this.”  
  
“It’s two in the afternoon,” Aziraphale said.  
  
“Two what?”  
  
“Two hours past noon,” Aziraphale explained.  
  
“That’s no kind of hour to be getting up in,” Crowley groaned. “That’s nap time.”  
  
“Maybe in Spain during the summer, but not here.”  
  
“Well, why the heaven not?”  
  
“Because Heaven’s messenger and de facto head of all Earthly operations is, again, sitting on our doorstep, for one.”  
  
“Eurgh,” Crowley said. “How often does this happen, any way?”  
  
“We generally only have to deal with one or both of them once a year or so,” Aziraphale said. “Once we’ve encouraged Gabriel to move on, that should be it for the next little while, in terms of ethereal and occult meddling, at least.”  
  
“Sooner faced, sooner done and over with?” Crowley asked. He couldn’t remember Aziraphale saying those words to him, but they sounded like the angel’s nevertheless.  
  
“Just so,” Aziraphale said, smiling. He held Crowley’s gaze for a beat or two before suddenly dropping it. “I’ll, uh- I’ll leave you to get dressed. Just come downstairs when you’re ready.” He’d nearly left the room when something seemed to occur to him. “Oh, and Crowley?”  
  
“Yes?” Crowley said, sitting back up from his really comfortable and warm bed with extreme reluctance.  
  
“You might want to get that dagger from yesterday out of the cabinet,” Aziraphale said. “Just in case.”

* * *

By the time Crowley had felt confident enough in his clothing choices to call himself dressed Aziraphale had miracled a change of clothing out of the room, dressed, and made some kind of hot beverage for them both (Aziraphale’s was obviously in the mug with the angel wings, while Crowley would guess that the one with the snake for a handle held his).  
  
“Oh good, there you are,” Aziraphale said, with highly visible relief. “Not that I object to making Gabriel sweat it out a bit, but I would also like to move him along. There is the neighborhood to think of.”  
  
“Yeah, sorry, I wasn’t entirely sure what clothing goes together with what,” he replied, headed towards the cabinet where he’d left the dagger yesterday. “How do I look?”  
  
“Dashing as always, my dear,” Aziraphale replied. He wasn’t looking at Crowley as he said it, so he didn’t see when Crowley nearly dropped the dagger in response. It was way too early for this, never mind that it was the afternoon.  
  
“Anything in particular you want me to do with this?” he asked.  
  
“Just lean somewhere where he can get a good look at you, and play with it a little while looking bored,” Aziraphale said. “You can chime in if you like, but don’t let him bait you into any kind of protracted debate.”  
  
“Got it,” Crowley said, leaning up against the round table of books set up just inside the door. He pushed his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose a little more firmly. Aziraphale nodded, first to him, and then to himself as he turned towards the door.  
  
“Right,” he said quietly, reaching for the doorknob. “Showtime.”  
  
He opened the doors out wide, and Crowley knew instinctively that this was a rare event, even though no one on the street seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. Then again, they probably had a vest interest in not noticing anything amiss, as there by the side of the road stood the Archangel fucking Gabriel.  
  
Crowley remembered him, vaguely, from Before. They hadn’t been friends or anything, but he’d tagged along after Michael the same way Crowley had tagged along after Lucifer, so it had been kind of hard not to know him. They’d had a run-in exactly once since that he could recall, not that Gabriel had realized it, thank Someone. Crowley had been working as a midwife at the time, and as a midwife who didn’t judge when she got the call that some teenager who was a bit too pregnant for the wedding date to line up was giving birth in a stable off she went, under the distinct impression that no one else would be coming along.  
  
Boy, had Crowley ever been wrong about that one.  
  
Today, Gabriel stood outside Aziraphale’s shop, dressed in clothing that was more like Aziraphale’s than Crowley’s and looking decided nervous.  
  
“Gabriel,” Aziraphale said, sounding sickly sweet. “What an unexpected pleasure.”  
  
“Aziraphale,” Gabriel said with an utterly insincere smile. “Good to see you, how have you been?”  
  
“Perfectly fine, aside from the minor murder attempt yesterday,” Aziraphale replied. “And yourself? Still an Archangel?”  
  
Crowley could both not believe that Aziraphale had the same lines for small talk as he had in Rome a good fifteen hundred- no, a good _two thousand_ years ago- and could absolutely believe it.  
  
“Well, yeah, of course,” Gabriel said. “What else would I be?”  
  
“Fallen?” Aziraphale suggested lightly.  
  
Crowley just barely managed not to drop his jaw down to the floor. Gabriel didn’t manage that himself.  
  
“You must admit, at this juncture it’s getting a little odd that neither of us has,” Aziraphale continued, leaning against the nearest door a little. “Or both of us, for that matter. I do seem to recall there being some pretty dire predictions as to what would come of consorting with the Adversary. Speaking of, how is Beelzebub? I presume they had you straighten out their nose after yesterday’s unpleasantness?”  
  
“Yeah, and the bite on the ear,” Gabriel said, his voice suddenly sharp. “Thank your snake for that- it was bitch to clean up. You know he’s behind you holding an unholy dagger, right?”  
  
“I am?” Crowley said, before Aziraphale could respond. “Oh no, that’s not right. I meant to be juggling by now.” He reached behind him, grabbed three of the non-book tchotchkes that lived on the table, and tossed them up into the air one after another. To his very great surprise he actually managed to juggle them, one handed. He wondered where he picked that up.  
  
“Oh no,” Aziraphale said, sounding amused. He didn’t bother turning around. “My oldest and dearest friend is being silly behind me. Whatever shall I do.”  
  
“Oldest and dearest _friend_?” Gabriel asked.  
  
Aziraphale tensed slightly. He started fiddling with his cufflinks, though the way he was leaning against the door made the movement look more bored than nervous.  
  
“Yes. He is,” Aziraphale said. “He’s also a phenomenal gardener, remarkably good with children-”  
  
Crowley put down the tchotchkes he was juggling before he could drop them and give the game away.  
  
“- and, in general, quite a delight to be around,” Aziraphale continued blithely on. Crowley was blushing so hard Gabriel could probably feel the heat coming from his face where he stood. “Oh, have I mentioned yet? He’s been teaching himself to cook. His waffles are wonderful. And-”  
  
“That’s enough!” Gabriel said, looking deeply uncomfortable.  
  
“Are you sure?” Aziraphale asked. “As you know, this is a subject about which I can speak at some length.”  
  
“Yeah, I know,” Gabriel said, looking even more uncomfortable. “I know. That’s enough.”  
  
Oh, there’s a story there and Crowley’s going to have to wheedle it out of Aziraphale later.  
  
“You’re quiet,” Gabriel said, looking past Aziraphale to Crowley.  
  
“You woke me up from my nap,” Crowley shot back. “If you want the full Crowley experience you’re going to have to make an appointment.”  
  
Gabriel twitched, his eyes cutting back to Aziraphale.  
  
“As you can see, we’re fine,” Aziraphale told him. “Thank you for your concern, do pass on our best to Beelzebub.” He stepped back into the shop proper, and swung the doors shut before Gabriel could reply. After a moment he relaxed, and let out a sigh of relief.  
  
“And he’s gone,”’ Aziraphale said.  
  
Crowley grinned. “That was incredible!” he said.  
  
Aziraphale started a bit. “Oh! You really think so?”  
  
“Yeah!” Crowley said, putting the dagger back into the cabinet. “Is that how you always talk with the Archangels now?”  
  
“No, only Gabriel,” Aziraphale said. “I tried being civil with him, when he first showed up post-Apocalypse, but it got me nowhere, so I just...” He shrugged, his hands fluttering out.  
  
“Bitch at him until he goes away?” Crowley asked.  
  
Aziraphale blushed, ducking his head a bit. “I must admit, I pretend to be you whenever I have to do that.”  
  
 _Oh._ “Uh… thank you?” Crowley was genuinely feeling something about the compliment which might have been gratitude, at least in part.  
  
Aziraphale had taken his mug and lifted it to his lips in the meantime. “Are you going back to sleep, do you think?”  
  
“No, no, the sudden unexpected Archangel Gabriel woke me right up,” Crowley said, reaching for his own mug. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting it to be, but the unmistakable scent of coffee was not it. “Is this coffee? Can we get coffee in England now?”  
  
“And tea,” Aziraphale said, lifting his own mug a little. “You can get just about anything in England these days, especially here in London.”  
  
Crowley lifted the mug experimentally to his lips. It was a little sweeter than he remembered it being, but not enough to actually qualify as being sweet, and it was strong and spiced with cardamom.  
  
“Actually,” Aziraphale said with the sly little grin that Crowley was doomed to forever associate with oysters, and then all the other things oysters were associated with. “Come with me into the kitchen a bit, there’s something I think you’ll enjoy there.”

* * *

“Well over a thousand years ago, there was a goat herder in Ethiopia named Kaldi.”  
  
“No. Absolutely not.”  
  
“One day, he noticed that when his goats ate the beans from a certain tree, they grew more energetic, and decided to try some of the beans himself.”  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
“And thus coffee was discovered! The package then goes on to describe the process by which they select their beans and such, but that’s the important part, I feel.”  
  
“Aziraphale. Angel. I made that story up.”  
  
“I know, but it was a good story,” Aziraphale said. “So they remembered it.”  
  
“How?” Crowley asked. “I only told it the one time, and I only told it so they’d let me near your monastery.”  
  
A good hundred years earlier (or six hundred years, whatever), Aziraphale had been holed up in Al-Makha with a bunch of Sufis, and Crowley had been biding his time until Ferrand Martinez (one of Ligur’s pets, that one) had finally fucked off and died before he returned home to Seville. He’d pretended it was a business trip- tempting priests wasn’t really his style, but it played well Downstairs, and when you couldn’t move without tripping over Imam This or Sheikh That or a good dozen dervishes, chances were good that you’d run into someone corrupt enough to report on. Easy marks and Aziraphale- it was as close to Heaven as Crowley would ever get. All he’d needed was a way inside. Introducing a new drink (well, he remembered drinking coffee back when he’d been hanging around Kandake Makeda, but the knowledge of how to brew coffee seemed to have been lost since) seemed a great way to accomplish all of that.  
  
“It was a good story,” Aziraphale repeated.  
  
“No it wasn’t, it was just-” He stopped as he realized something. “Aziraphale! Did you _write it down_?”  
  
“Yes, though the original seems to have been lost or destroyed in the meantime,” Aziraphale told him. “Which is a pity, because I made a very good calligraphy goat at the center of it, if I do say so myself. It was very spritely, I was quite proud of how it turned out.”  
  
Crowley stared at him. Aziraphale took a sip of his tea in a manner that could only be described as smug.  
  
“And they remembered it,” Crowley said. “Thanks to you.”  
  
“We went to Ethiopia a few years back, you wouldn’t believe how many coffee shops are named after Kaldi and/or his goats,” Aziraphale said with a satisfied wiggle.  
  
Crowley groaned. “That’s incredible. Just- completely incredible.”  
  
“No, what’s incredible is that this company also makes one of the very few sweets you enjoy eating,” Aziraphale said.  
  
“Oh?”  
  
For an answer, Aziraphale reached behind him and grabbed a small canister off the counter before sliding it across the table.  
  
“Go on then,” Aziraphale said, propping his chin up on the back of his hand with a smile.  
  
Feeling oddly flustered and not really sure why, Crowley opened up the canisters, which was full of round brown globs of _something_ and cautiously popped one into his mouth. Rich, bitter flavor burst on his tongue- coffee, yes, but was coffee dipped in something else that melted in his mouth and almost reminded him of-  
  
“Cocoa?” Crowley asked. “Is this cocoa? How did they get-” He cut himself off when he realized that if the humans had gotten into space then they’d almost certainly noticed the other three continents floating around on the other side of the world.  
  
“Oh my word. You only remember as far back as 1481,” Aziraphale said with a chuckle. “You missed the entire Columbian exchange.” He stopped, all traces of laughter falling from his face. “Oh _fuck_ , you missed the entire Columbian exchange.”  
  
“Do you swear regularly now, or-”  
  
“I swear when it’s appropriate,” Aziraphale said, his tone clipped. He sighed, and then straightened up a bit. “Right. Well, first off: the food is excellent now. There is so much more available, and so much more variety. Things like corn and potatoes are pretty much ubiquitous- though corn didn’t really do the Soviets many favors, and potatoes did even fewer for the Irish. But it’s been mostly a good thing. There are apples growing wild in North America- they even have an expression “as American as apple pie” and they mean it without a shred of irony. Cassava took root in West Africa, and they learned to bake some really excellent bread out of it. Chili peppers spread all throughout Asia, it’s vitally important these days, and I must say I’m particularly fond of what the cooks in the Szechuan Province of China have done with it. Coffee is actually mostly grown in Brazil now, which is on the South American continent, and sugar cane is also widely grown there, though more of it is being used for fuel these days rather than food. Cocoa, meanwhile, is mostly grown in Africa, but it’s used by confectioners all over the world. I must say that I’m particularly fond of what’s come out of Belgium and France. They’ve made it quite sweet, which naturally you despise but you’re very much in the minority, I’m afraid.”  
  
 _Sweet cocoa?_ Crowley might have asked, if he were less annoyed. He frowned more severely instead.  
  
“And tomatoes!” Aziraphale continued to ramble on. “Goodness, you would not believe what the Italians have done with tomatoes, particularly around Naples. And vindaloo! Originally a Portuguese dish, made in Goa with ingredients both local and from the Americas, and now it’s considered an important part of British cuisine.”  
  
“Are you finished?” Crowley asked.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said with another sigh. “I’m trying to think of a good way to explain this, but you’ve forgotten nearly everything I could use as a frame of reference.”  
  
“Was it worse than the Flood?” Crowley asked.  
  
“No,” Aziraphale said immediately, with obvious relief. “No, it wasn’t quite that bad.”  
  
“Worse than the Plagues in Egypt?” Crowley pressed.  
  
Aziraphale hesitated, and then twitched his head to the side in what was not quite a shake.  
  
“You’re joking. Please, tell me you’re joking,” Crowley pleaded.  
  
“Honestly, put the plagues _before_ the four hundred years of slavery and that’s not a bad analogy,” Aziraphale said. “Not for the worst parts of it, at least- and it wasn’t, it wasn't _all_ bad, just. The colonial empire thing went to some predictably not good places. And some even worse than expected places, to be frank.”  
  
Crowley took a deep breath. “Explain,” he said. “Which of our sides- or ex sides- or was it like the Inquisition?”  
  
“It was like the Inquisition, in that it was wholly human,” Aziraphale assured him. “You didn’t get any commendations for it, as I understand it. Not for much of the early work, at least- I know you got some undeserved commendations here and there for things which happened in the Americas but that was mostly later, after Columbus, and not really to do with colonial expansion business.”  
  
“Columbus? Start there, I don’t know who or what that is,” Crowley told him.  
  
“Christopher Columbus,” Aziraphale said, so definitely a who then. “He was a Genoan-born explorer and merchant who theorized that you could sail to Asia by way of going west on the Atlantic Ocean.”  
  
“Oh boy,” Crowley said.  
  
“Yes, but at the time no one quite understood how big the world was, much less that there were a couple of continents in the way,” Aziraphale said. “Eventually, he secured funding from the Spanish monarchs-”  
  
“I already don’t like him,” Crowley muttered.  
  
“And in his efforts to reach Asia he bumped into what it now known as the Americas, which prompted a great deal of exploration and land grabbing and such,” Aziraphale said. “As a part of his agreement with the Castilian Crown, he was named Viceroy and Governor of the early Spanish colonies. He proved to be quite a tyrant. Originally, I’d heard that he’d been arrested by the Spanish Inquisition for his brutality, but that turned out to be untrue. It was the Order of Calatrava that did the arresting. He eventually talked himself into a pardon, though he would never again be governor of anything, and his heirs kept the Crown tied up in lawsuits for-”  
  
“The Spanish Inquisition?” Crowley asked.  
  
“Well, no,” Aziraphale said, a little frown creasing his forehead. “I’ve just said-”  
  
“Yeah, they didn’t arrest this Columbus fellow, but were they in the Spanish colonies to do the arresting?” Crowley asked.  
  
“Ah,” Aziraphale said.

“Well?” Crowley demanded.  
  
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, after a moment of hesitation. “Yes, the Spanish did export the Inquisition to their colonies. There were separate offices, even, set up in Peru and Mexico. And the Portuguese took it up from them as well, as a result of a marital alliance between Aragon and Portugal. And they then took it to _their_ colonies.”  
  
“Downstairs loved that, I’ll bet,” Crowley said.  
  
“Actually, from what you told me, they got rather tired of it,” Aziraphale said. “At one point they accused you of not being able to come up with anything new and original, so you had to go to Hell and defend the innovations of Goan Inquisition to get them off your back… I’m glad you thought to send me a note, before you went. You’d assembled a rather large collection of port wine, while you were living in Porto. If I hadn’t been there, I do believe you might have tried to down it in its entirety in one go all on your own.”  
  
“And instead, I split it with you,” Crowley guessed.  
  
“We got rather spectacularly drunk,” Aziraphale agreed.  
  
Yeah, that sounded like an absolutely stellar idea right about now. Crowley ate another cocoa coffee bean instead.  
  
“That must have been bloody,” Crowley said. “All that colonizing.” He didn’t want to talk about the Inquisition _s_ any more. He really hoped he never had to talk about it again. “I can’t imagine that Qʼumarkaj took that lying down. Or the Haudenosaunee Confederation. Or Tawantinsuyu. Or even, like, Quilgualtanqui. Or, the altepetls, crap, that couldn’t have been an easy fight. I popped over to Tenochtitlan about fifty years before my memories cut out, and they had easily a quarter of a million people living there just in the one city.”  
  
“Oh? You were there?” Aziraphale asked, looking surprised.  
  
“Yeah. Scary amounts of human sacrifice, but also the cleanest streets I’d seen since Rome, particularly given the size of the population,” Crowley said. “I got curious, and I had time to kill, so I went there after we’d parted ways in Naples, before heading-”  
  
Heading back home, to Seville. Seville, which could no longer be home to anything but the Inquisition. He wondered if he’d been back, since. Somehow, he doubted it.  
  
“Anyway, I can’t see that lot being easy to defeat. I mean, a quarter of a million people? That’s bigger than most cities over here, particularly after the Great Plague,” Crowley said. “How did they get the numbers for that.”  
  
“Funny you should mention the Black Death,” Aziraphale said with a strained sort of pitch to his voice.  
  
“Oh no,” Crowley groaned.  
  
“It spread to the Americas,” Aziraphale confirmed. “Along with cholera, typhus, malaria, tuberculous… smallpox turned out to be the big killer, though, as I understand it.”  
  
“The Great Plague. The Black Death. Whatever we’re calling it these days. That was- it killed one out of three people, in the best of circumstances.”  
  
“Between all the different epidemics, it worked out to being roughly twice that, for the indigenous peoples of the Americas,” Aziraphale said. “In the best of circumstances.”  
  
“So not a quarter of a million people, then,” Crowley said. “Not even a hundred thousand people.”  
  
“Many of them sick, or tending to relatives dying of illnesses they’d never seen before,” Aziraphale said. “And the Europeans came over with fewer people, yes, but they were quite capable of making strategic alliances with other nations who wanted out from under the thumbs whoever they were fighting against to round things out a bit. To say nothing of the fact that they came over with guns and horses. The survivors were generally enslaved. The peoples they’d allied with were generally enslaved too, after enough time had passed for relations to cool and the need for more slaves to grow pressing. It wasn’t long before they started importing slaves, some from Asia but mainly from Africa. The mortality rate was awful. You remember how the mines were run in Rome? How people were just swallowed up whole? It was like that, only largely agrarian. It rather emptied out a large portion of that continent as well, which only made it a tempting target for the establishment of further European colonies… that was the tone of things, for a while. Most of the European powers got in on it, eventually: Portugal, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Russia, Sweden, England… we were particularly virulent, actually. Largest empire in the history of the planet. _The sun never sets on British Empire_ was the phrase, and it was true. There were so many colonies over so much of the world that it was bound to be daylight hours somewhere within its borders.”  
  
“Well, fuck,” was the only thing Crowley could think to say to that.  
  
“Yes,” Aziraphale said. “Quite.”  
  
He took a sip of his tea. Crowley stared down at his canister of cocoa coffee beans, and tasted bitterness on his tongue.  
  
“It wasn’t- it wasn’t all bad. The Americas as a whole, I mean, the whole genocide and slavery business was absolutely that bad,” Aziraphale said.  
  
“Because of _vindaloo_?” Crowley asked. He couldn’t remember ever eating anything by that name, but he doubted it was that good.  
  
“No, because of the people who exist today who, in all likelihood, would never have existed without that history, a bloody waste of human life though it was,” Aziraphale said. “Anathema, for one. The whole world might very well have ceased to exist without her. And Warlock might be a bit spoiled, but he’s growing up nicely, I do believe he’ll be quite alright given a few more years to mature. More broadly speaking, the New World nations themselves aren’t any better or worse than Old World ones. Some of the indigenous nations managed to hold on to their culture and language and some of them are even beginning to rebuild themselves a bit. A lot of people moved to the Americas voluntarily, or as a refuge from war and persecution in the native homelands, so you have people from all over rubbing elbows and exchanging ideas about as often as they exchange blows. And once slavery began to be outlawed, there started being these great explosions in art and culture from their descendants, and-”  
  
“Wait, go back,” Crowley interrupted him. “What was that last bit.”  
  
“Oh well, hmm. You know, I don’t know if you actually caught any of the Harlem Renaissance, and neither one of our corporations precisely fit in, but-”  
  
“No, no, go back to slavery being outlawed,” Crowley said.  
  
“Oh! Slavery is illegal now,” Aziraphale said, like that hadn’t been a blight on the human condition for thousands of years that had suddenly cleared up in the space of less than six hundred. “The whole world over, not just this part- though some places have something of a loophole with regards to prison labor, and there’s unfortunately a brisk illegal trade. But yes, no one legally owns anyone else these days.”  
  
“For Someone’s sake, Aziraphale,” Crowley spluttered. “Lead with the good news next time, yeah? I feel like I’ve just run a bloody marathon.” He popped three more beans into his mouth, which was probably not going to help the way his hands wanted to shake, but whatever. Two continents worth of slavery and genocide- or was it three? North America, South America, and… he wanted to call it Australia, that other one in the Pacific. Maybe that one came through okay?  
  
He couldn’t even think the question without extremely doubting that it had not been okay at all.  
  
“Well, women now have full legal parity with men,” Aziraphale said, shocking him out of his line of thought. “Not a worldwide phenomena, I’m afraid, and while the law of the land is clear on the subject there are some people who cling to old attitudes about gender roles, but it’s miles and away better than it used to be. We’ve even had three female prime ministers here in Great Britain. Two of them… were not great people, in my opinion, but the one we have at present seems to be tolerable as far as politicians go. Adam worked on her campaign a bit.”  
  
“Tolerability and an endorsement from the Antichrist,” Crowley said with a snort. “That’s high praise. What about the Pope? Is the Pope still a man?”  
  
“And likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, though there’s a decent chance that the next Archbishop of Canterbury will not be,” Aziraphale told him.  
  
Crowley stared at him.  
  
“It’s no longer affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church,” Aziraphale said. “It broke away during the Protestant Reformation- that other schism I mentioned earlier. It’s now part of the Anglican Communion. Church of England, specifically, it’s their senior most position that’s actually ecclesiastical, given that the technical head of the Church is also the Crown.”  
  
Crowley stared some more, and then popped another bean into his mouth.  
  
“It’s funny,” he said, once he’d crunched it down. “I was about to say that I was pretty glad that I remembered none of that. And I’m still not sure I want to know all the gory details. But you know what? I really want to know how humanity got from that mess to this.”  
  
“Oh, it’s still a bit of a mess,” Aziraphale said. “It’s just a very different mess than it was six hundred years ago. It’s a much more enjoyable mess, or so I’ve found.”  
  
Crowley nodded, and popped another half dozen or so beans into his mouth simply to have something to do with his hands.  
  
“You know,” Aziraphale said after a minute. “There is something you’ve started doing over the past few decades to… deal with all the mess, so to speak.”  
  
“Oh?” Crowley asked.  
  
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, with a resolute little nod. “Why don’t you finish up your coffee before it gets cold, and then I’ll take you up to the solarium and reintroduce you to your plants.”  
  
Crowley paused with his mug raised halfway to his lips. “My what.”

* * *

The solarium was located up a narrow staircase that definitely went up further than the thirty or so steps implied.  
  
“Well, I do own the building, including the air rights,” Aziraphale said. “ _Cuius est solum_ and all that. There are no flights over this part of London, any drones that come through are illegal, and none of the neighbors are high up enough to notice.”  
  
“Drones?” Crowley asked.  
  
“Unmanned, remotely-controlled flying machines,” Aziraphale explained. “When used properly, they’re good for surveying properties and taking photographs. Improperly… you didn’t deserve that commendation either.”  
  
Before Crowley could even begin to figure out whether he wanted to ask for an explanation, Aziraphale pushed open the door. “After you, my dear,” he said.  
  
The stairwell was very narrow, and Crowley couldn’t help but to brush against Aziraphale as he shimmied past him into the solarium. He didn’t really have time to properly appreciate the sensation, which was probably for the best. He was too busy picking his jaw up from the floor.  
  
“Angel,” Crowley said, turning around slowly. “Do you- do you know what this is? What it’s based off of, I mean?”  
  
“The Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” Aziraphale said promptly. “Well, the one in Nineveh, at least. You always said that was the best part of being assigned to Sennecherib.”  
  
“Yeah, yeah, it was,” Crowley replied, still turning around on the spot. Columns, terraces, waterfalls- there were even some water screws, or something like that, which he could see pumping water up to the top level of the place. It was, for the most part, very brightly lit, because it was almost entirely made of glass, and very warm. “It really was. I would have loved to have shown it to you.” He was facing away from Aziraphale when he said it, so he let himself wince at his own tone.  
  
He needn’t have bothered.  
  
“I’m sorry to say I don’t think I would have gone, if you’d asked,” Aziraphale said mournfully.  
  
“I probably wouldn’t have asked, not then,” Crowley admitted. “We weren’t exactly on speaking terms with one another, not until sometime the next century. By that time...”  
  
“Nineveh had been sacked and the gardens were gone,” Aziraphale finished.  
  
“Yeah. That.”  
  
They were silent for a moment.  
  
“Admittedly, I’m rather biased and have no basis for comparison to boot, but I can’t help but feel like your garden must be the greater splendor of the two,” Aziraphale said.  
  
“Oh! Um, oh,” Crowley said intelligently.  
  
There was another, shorter pause, and then Aziraphale cleared his throat. “So. You’ve written out instructions as to how to care for each plant, so I can look after them whenever you want to take one of your week-long naps,” he said, tapping one of the little placards that littered the solarium. “You’ve got a sort of tropical center back down that way, there’s a dessert area to your left, and the plants next to the stakes marked with the green leaves are the endangered ones you’re growing for the Woodland Trust, and are _not_ to be yelled at.”  
  
“Woodland Trust?”  
  
“It’s a conservation organization,” Aziraphale explained, and then when he saw the continuing blank expression on Crowley’s face, he added “Do you remember how everyone panicked when they realized that there was no silphium to be found?”  
  
“Do I?” Crowley replied. “How could I forget?”  
  
“Yes, well, the humans have started noticing these things before they die out, and have set up various conservation organizations in order to prevent their extinction,” Aziraphale continued. “The Woodland Trust works in the UK- which is essentially England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland for at least the next few years- and you’ve recently picked up some work for them, helping to nurse some endangered species for them to plant. You’re particularly proud of your ghost orchids,” Aziraphale said, pointing to a darkened area of the solarium beneath several short trees. “I think because you were told that you were never going to be able to grow them.”  
  
Well, that last bit tracked, at least. “And why do I work with them now? That doesn’t seem very wily or-” Wait. He didn’t work for Hell anymore, did he?  
  
“I think that’s part of the appeal,” Aziraphale confirmed, smiling gently. “You need to do _something_ to fill the time after we were let go, and you do like plants- or you like working with them, at least. And, well. After the Apocalypse we both felt a sort of sense of commitment towards protecting the world, keeping it a place worth living, making it an even better place to live in than it is now, even. Which is why I’m currently embroiled in a vicious row with several members of the Westminster City Planning Commission, which in turn is probably why all those blasted land developers have started expressing an interest in my shop again… but that’s another story.”  
  
“And- just to go back a bit- the yelling?” Crowley asked, deciding he was probably better off dealing with the rest of that later.  
  
“Oh, you yell at them,” Aziraphale told him. “Threaten them with all sorts of dire fates if they don’t grow to standard.”  
  
“...why.” Crowley was pretty impressed with himself for not asking if he’d gone completely mental at some point in the last few centuries.  
  
“It makes them grow better,” Aziraphale said. “Keeps them from slacking off, or so you’ve always claimed. Anyway, all the tools you should need are along this wall here- they’re all labelled. I’ll just- I’ll leave you to it then. I’ll be downstairs when you’re done.”  
  
“Okay?” Crowley asked, but Aziraphale had already stepped back down into the stairwell and was closing the door behind him. “Okay. Sure.” The door closed with a gentle click. “ _What the fuck?_ ”  
  
Unfortunately, it seemed like the only person who could answer his question was himself, five hundred plus years of experience later, and he wasn’t available for comment. Giving himself a shake, he sauntered over to the wall of gardening tools and squinted.  
  
His first reaction was that it was weird to look at his handwriting in the Roman alphabet. Like a lot of people in his part of town, Crowley still kept his records aljamiado, for mostly the same reasons he kept calling the various toll and taxes the remaining Jews of Christian Spain were required to pay jizya: spite, pure and simple. He hadn’t much liked the Almoravids, or any of their successors for that matter. He just didn’t like the new kids- not Castille, not Navarre, not any of them- very much either, and tended to encourage irreverence towards them whenever he could.  
  
Maybe that was why the Inquisition had set up shop in Seville. It had to have been something to do with him, right? It couldn’t have just been proximity, could it? He’d known for a while that Hell didn’t seem to keep close track of how he conducted his business, not like Heaven kept track of Aziraphale’s miracles. Whenever Hell had caught him at something, it was because someone was lurking close by and he hadn’t noticed them. No one ever mentioned a paper trail.  
  
 _It’s been over for centuries,_ he told himself, pushing the thought away. _It’s dead. Let it rest._  
  
He picked up something labeled “plant mister” and turned towards the plants.  
  
“Alright you lot, listen up!” He shouted, and many of the plants began to tremble. Oh. Okay. That was a thing. “I don’t remember anything after 1481! So as far as I’m concerned I just woke up yesterday and discovered pretty much all of my wildest dreams had come true! I don’t want to yell at you about anything!” He paused for dramatic effect, and found the plants were somehow giving off the impression of being confused. He was absolutely certain that no plant in the fifteenth century had been capable of this. “So you’ve got the day off while I figure out what I’m doing! Don’t get comfortable!”  
  
The plants began to tremble again.  
  
Crowley turned towards the closest one, and began to read the placard in front of it for clues as to what he should be doing.

* * *

It took Crowley several hours (including one yell down the stairs to determine that it was Thursday) to work out what it was that he was supposed to be doing with each plant, and then actually go about doing it. While it was obviously taking longer to do than was usual, he couldn’t help but notice that if this really was the sort of thing he did on a near-daily basis, then it was something he did spend more than a few minutes doing.  
  
 _Is this my life now?_ he wondered, taking a moment to stare at a small pomegranate tree. _Tend to the garden above Aziraphale’s shop? Eat vindaloo with him? Sleep with- well. Under the same roof as him, at least._  
  
It was getting dark by the time he’d finished, and some kind of hot, bright light had turned on over the desert and tropical areas. Crowley made sure he’d put the tools back in the right spots before going downstairs.  
  
Aziraphale was talking to someone, downstairs in the kitchen. Crowley could only hear his end of the conversation, and when he finally made it down to the ground floor he could see that Aziraphale was holding something to his ear, twisting and untwisting some kind of cord that was attached to the end of it from his finger.  
  
“- yes, it’s quite irregular,” Aziraphale was saying. “There is a sort of specialist, but she went to go visit family in Puerto Rico and- yes, the hurricane. She’s a bit stranded.”  
  
He was silent for a moment, listening, biting into his lip.  
  
“Well, it’s not so much the deposit, and I suppose no one will complain about there being _more_ food donated, but it’s only- well, you of all people have some idea of how long we’ve been planning this. We didn’t exactly set a backup date. How long would it take to set it all up again?”  
  
More silence. Aziraphale was nodding, but he didn’t look happy.  
  
“And just- just as a matter of curiosity- how late do you think we should wait before cancelling it, or officially putting it off, at least?” Aziraphale looked even less happy. “How long _could_ we wait, do you think?”  
  
He sighed. “All right. I’ll take it under advisement.” Another pause. “I hope so, too. Take care, dear girl.” He untwisted the cord from his finger one final time and put the contraption down with a sort of musical click.  
  
He turned around then, and caught sight of Crowley. “Oh! How long have you been standing there?”  
  
“Just caught the end,” Crowley told him. He pointed to the thing Aziraphale had just put down. “What is that?”  
  
“That’s the phone,” Aziraphale said, adding at Crowley’s confused look. “It’s the shop’s landline phone. This is what telephones looked like where they were first invented. It stays hooked into the wall here- though I can still place a call to anywhere from it, more or less- as opposed to a mobile phone, which can be carried around with you everywhere.”  
  
“Which is why it’s called a mobile!” Crowley exclaimed.  
  
“Yes, precisely!” Aziraphale replied, grinning. “At any rate, it’s just gone past seven, the perfect time for some supper. There are several Indian establishments that do meal deliveries, I was wondering if perhaps you might like to try some vindaloo?”  
  
“Sure, I can give that a go,” Crowley replied. “Did I like it the first time around?”  
  
“I’m not sure about the first time,” Aziraphale admitted. “I wasn’t there, I think- but you like it just fine now. There’s some menus around here somewhere- just take a look, see if anything pops out at you, and I’ll let you know if it’s one of your usuals.”  
  
Crowley nodded, as Aziraphale began to poke around for the menus. He seemed perfectly content to shrug off whatever it was that had upset him during his conversation with the landline, and Crowley spent about ten seconds considering doing the same.  
  
“So, what was that about?” he asked, nodding towards the landline.  
  
Aziraphale was very intently poking into some cabinets, and didn’t turn around when he replied. “Oh, it’s nothing you need to worry about, dear.”  
  
Crowley’s eyebrow shot up. “Yeah, that doesn’t sound like a deflection from something suspicious at all,” he drawled.  
  
Aziraphale sighed, and turned around. “We’d planned something of a get-together next month. It’s- it’s the ten year anniversary of the world not ending, and we wanted to mark the occasion.”  
  
That sounded plausible. It would have sounded more plausible if Aziraphale wasn’t obviously choosing his every word with care.  
  
“You know, just because I don’t remember doesn’t mean-”  
  
“The fact that you don’t remember means a great deal, actually,” Aziraphale snapped.  
  
“How so? World’s still saved, we’re still free- what am I missing?” Crowley shot back. “Fill me in, Aziraphale. It’s the only way I’m ever going to know.”  
  
Aziraphale’s face crumpled. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of!”  
  
“What? Not telling me something?”  
  
“No! That all you’ll have is- is my perception of things. This isn’t- this is something you need your own memories of. Not just what I know of them.”  
  
Crowley studied him for a moment. “I trust you,” he said. They were friends, right? He could say that.  
  
It wasn’t helping. Aziraphale looked even more distressed. “And I trust you,” he said. “It’s not- this isn’t a matter of trusting. It’s not even a matter of liking! It’s like- it’s like-” He frowned, and then snapped. A small collection of papers appeared in his hand. “It’s like vindaloo,” he said. “I can tell you what you like, now. I can’t tell you when your first taste was, where it was, who you were dining with, how the dish was prepared. I can’t tell you if you like this type because it still involves cinnamon and vinegar as is traditional, or if you like this other kind because the only thing you can taste are the chilies. I never thought to ask. It never came up. And this is much, _much_ more important than vindaloo. Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked.  
  
“Not really,” Crowley admitted.  
  
Aziraphale slumped a bit, before rallying. “Well. How about this: once we hear back from Anathema, if the news isn’t- isn’t good, if she can’t come in time, or there’s nothing she can do to restore your memories- then I will tell you everything I know, and we can take it from there. Is that acceptable?”  
  
Crowley nodded.  
  
Aziraphale smiled, relieved. “Good. Now, here are the menus. Take a good look, and then we’ll order in.”  
  
Menus were lists of food and prices, something he’d last seen in- well, he guessed it was China now. There were, as promised several of them. Crowley sat down at the kitchen table, and waited to see if anything would jump out at him, if anything seemed familiar.  
  
When he jabbed his finger at one particular dish, Aziraphale beamed at him, despite the fact that it wasn’t even vindaloo- it was something called chicken tikka masala- and he was almost glad enough that he’d been able to guess right to forget the sense of impending doom that had settled over him.

* * *

_HERE WE ARE, BORN TO BE KINGS_

For the third time in as many days, Crowley awoke to find that his already strange life had taken a turn for the stranger while he was sleeping.

“Crowley! The Bentley’s back!”

_WE’RE THE PRINCES OF THE UNIVERSE_

“Is that what cars sound like?” Crowley asked, hauling himself out of bed with a groan. He snapped some clothing onto himself and began to slink towards the stairs. “With the singing and the musical accompaniment?”

_HERE WE BELONG, FIGHTING TO SURVIVE_

“Yours does!” Aziraphale replied. “In all fairness, though, I think most automobiles have some kind of stereo system built in. Yours favors this particular kind of music, it’s-”

The rest of his words were lost beneath the rumbling cry of _IN A WORLD WITH THE DARKEST POWERS_

The music was growing louder. Crowley was nearly deafened by it, and Aziraphale had to come over and shout directly in his ear “I THINK SHE’S ONLY GOING TO PLAY IT MORE AND MORE LOUDLY UNTIL SHE SEES THAT YOU’RE ALL RIGHT!”

“OKAY!” Crowley replied. “WHERE IS SHE?”

She was just outside the back door Aziraphale had in his kitchen, apparently. No sooner had he stepped out into the alleyway than the music turned itself down to less ear splitting levels.

“Wow,” Crowley said. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected the Bentley to look like, but it wasn’t this. She didn’t look like any of the cars that were passing the shop by on the main street. She didn’t look like any of the cars that had been on the film they’d watched yesterday, for that matter. “So. You’re the Bentley then, is that right?”

The music shut itself off.

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said. “You’re probably going to need to explain that to her.”

The door on the side of the Bentley popped open in agreement.

“Right, okay,” Crowley said. He slid into the seat the Bentley had indicated, and tried not to wince when the door shut behind him.

“Right, okay,” he said again. “I’m just going to go ahead and assume you can hear me. Short version: I don’t actually remember the last five hundred and fifty-ish years. Which means that, essentially, I don’t remember you.”

The Bentley made no response.

“Aziraphale’s pretty sure that my memories aren’t gone, that they're just sort of buried somewhere, and he thinks there’s a good chance we can get them back soon. We’ve just got to wait for a witch to come back from Puerto Rico, apparently.”

Still no response.

“He’s told me a bit about you, said we get along a treat. I don’t doubt that- you save me from horses apparently. Have you ever met a horse? They are nasty creatures, terrible on the buttocks, ornery as anything, shit everywhere, and then you’ve got to change them out every fifty miles. I’m sure I’m very grateful for the rescue.”

The Bentley suddenly began to sing again.

_The machine of a dream, such a clean machine  
With the pistons a pumpin', and the hubcaps all gleam  
When I'm holding your wheel  
All I hear is your gear  
With my hand on your grease gun  
Mmm, it's like a disease, son  
I'm in love with my car, gotta feel for my automobile  
Get a grip on my boy racer roll bar_

There was a knock on the window, which then retracted into the door of the Bentley somehow.

“All well?” Aziraphale asked.

“I’m in love with my car, apparently,” Crowley said, trying not to laugh. “Question: do I just go around randomly giving the things I own sentience now?”

“I didn’t think it was random,” Aziraphale replied. “And you’ve definitely been doing it for a couple thousand years, at least.”

“Come off it, no I haven’t,” Crowley scoffed.

“Yes you have,” Aziraphale insisted. “You had that donkey in Galilee, remember? It kept defecating every time someone in a Roman uniform went by, amongst other things.”

“That’s a donkey,” Crowley dismissed. “It already had a mind of its own before I took it up, they all do.”

“Not like that they don’t,” Aziraphale said. “And then there were all those statues and figurines you made in during your sojourn at Artukulu-”

“Those were _automata_ , and Ismail made most of them-”

“Ismail invented several mechanism of early robotics trying to replicate what you did with a snap of your fingers,” Aziraphale said. “And to his credit, he managed it much better than I would have expected.”

“But they didn't have any personality, they just-”

“No, no, they did,” Aziraphale insisted. “They used to follow me around the palace. Bring me things. One of them even managed to smuggle me some wine, after a particularly bad day.”

Ah. Well. He hadn’t meant for that to happen.

“And what’s this music called?” Crowley asked.

It was a patently obvious change of topic, but Aziraphale didn’t seem to notice because the question seemed to throw him deep into some kind of moral quandary.

“Angel?” Crowley asked after a moment.

“The name of the band is Queen,” Aziraphale said, and then he sighed. “I believe their genre of choice is some variety of rock, possibly of the classic variety, but ‘classic’ has become some of a more generally positive descriptor of late, and I’m not sure whether you mean it as a compliment or a specification.”

“O...kay?” Crowley asked, as the music from the Bentley suddenly changed.

_Ooh love ooh loverboy  
What're you doin' tonight, hey boy  
Set my alarm, turn on my charm  
That's because I'm a good old-fashioned lover boy_

With Aziraphale leaning in from the other side of the door, Crowley abruptly realized, their faces were very close together. As the lyrics registers, Aziraphale’s eyes widened and he straightened abruptly. Crowley tried to figure out how he could hiss at the Bentley to cut it out without Aziraphale noticing when Aziraphale said “Oh, bother.”

“What?”

“I do believe that the Archangel Uriel has just arrived.”

“What?” Crowley asked. The music shut itself off, and the door opened for him.

“Come on, let’s get inside,” Aziraphale said. “She’ll knock on the front door.”

“I thought you said that we were done with the Archangels.”

“We’re done with Gabriel and Beelzebub,” Aziraphale said, holding the door open for him. “Uriel is her own, separate issue.”

“Right, okay, you can walk me through that later,” Crowley said. “What do we need to see her off, then? Should I juggle? When did I learn to juggle, by the way?”

Aziraphale gave him a look.

“Right, scratch that last one, it’s not important,” Crowley said.

There was a polite sounding knock on the front door of the shop.

“What do we do?” Crowley asked again.

“Honestly I think the best course of action would be for you to lie down on the settee and pretend to be asleep.”

“What?”

“Please,” Aziraphale said, looking deadly serious. “Uriel is… you’re right, I’ll give you the details later, but right now it’s best if she thinks that you’re sleeping it off.”

They’d walked through the kitchen and into the sitting room by now. Aziraphale took him firmly by the shoulders and pressed him down onto the settee. Surprised by the contact, Crowley went down a bit harder than he’d intended.

“Sorry.”

“You owe me one heaven of an explanation, angel,” Crowley warned him.

“I know. And I will,” Aziraphale promised, and then he was gone to face down Uriel.

* * *

Aziraphale really did owe him one heaven of an explanation- and an earth of an explanation, and a hell of an explanation too.  
  
“Uriel.”  
  
“Aziraphale.” There was a beat of silence, and then, more softly. “Are the both of you well?”  
  
“Well enough. Crowley’s sleeping it off- as you might imagine, fooling the Prince of Hell takes it out of a demon. Or ex-demon, or whatever it is he and I are now.”  
  
“Yes. I would imagine so.”  
  
Out of all the half-baked ideas that flitted through his head, he hadn’t imagined that a visit from the Archangel Uriel would involve anything like _civil conversation_.  
  
“I didn’t know that this was even being considered as an option.”  
  
“Don’t feel too badly about that, I rather got the impression from Gabriel’s visit yesterday that he didn’t know very far in advance either.”  
  
“Still. That must have been terrifying.”  
  
“It was. But at the same time… well. This was not one of the better plans they’ve come up with. They could have succeeded. They could have taken all of his memories clear back to Eden, and I doubt very much that he would have hurt me. I would have had a time of it, gaining his trust back, but he wouldn’t hurt me.”  
  
Crowley made an instinctive noise of protest that was, perhaps mercifully, swallowed up by the sound of the mobile phone ringing.  
  
“Don’t answer that!” Aziraphale snapped immediately. “Crowley, you need _rest_.”  
  
“It’s my own bloody mobile! And it’s making noise!” Crowley called back, scrambling for the phone, which had been moved from the kitchen and into the sitting room at some point.  
  
The first thing he realized was that he had no idea how to turn the thing off. The second thing he realized was that there was another picture on the mobile’s screen. It was like the one next to the till, in that it was of the two of them. It was unlike the picture next to the till in just about every other way possible.  
  
Crowley stared down at it, distantly aware of the fact that his mouth was agape and not much else. Then the mobile stopped ringing and the screen went dark.  
  
“What? No no no...” He jabbed his fingers down onto the screen, hoping that he’d hit whatever it was he needed to hit to make the thing turn on again.  
  
“Well, I suppose you’ll be wanting that explanation now, yes?” Aziraphale asked as he walked into the room.  
  
“Yessss!” Crowley nearly shouted, hissing in spite of himself.  
  
Aziraphale blinked, but settled himself down next to him on the settee. “Just after Armageddon, the Archangels were quite united against us- or at least able to act like it in public. After their first attempt on our lives failed, however things began to fracture. They were squabbling during their next attempt, and during the third I may have accidentally provoked something of a nervous breakdown in Sandalphon.”  
  
“What,” Crowley croaked, before he remembered: right, Archangels. There had just been one of those at their door. There had been another one at their door the day before.  
  
Their door. The door that he and Aziraphale shared, because they lived together.  
  
“Well,” Aziraphale said, blushing slightly. “They had managed a bit of Enochian binding, so I was obliged to speak, and to speak truthfully, but the obligation to answer their questions didn’t quite take. I had to speak on the same general subject, but I could avoid directly answering their questions- or at least bury the answers in a great deal of other information. They wanted to know about you, and they put Sandalphon in charge of interrogating me, and, well, I’ve known you for six thousand years! I wasn’t exactly starved for material, and they only had me for a matter of hours. I hadn’t even worked through all the really flattering stories about you before you came to rescue me.”  
  
Crowley made some sort of high-pitched noise that probably wasn’t worth trying to transcribe.  
  
“At any rate, Sandalphon decided to take a step down after that. Step away, really, he’s off somewhere finding himself. Uriel knows where he is, I believe, but she’s not telling anyone. Anyway, after that, things fractured further. Uriel came down and apologized, for her part in how things played out during Armageddon, and afterwards. She’s quite sincere in her regret- or so I believe, you’re a bit more skeptical. She also said that she’d deleted all the records of my interrogation, which I suppose must be true- they would have known that this wouldn’t work, in terms of getting you to kill me, if they’d had that information. Anyway, that’s why she’s allowed up to the front door. Michael also apologized, but as much as I want to believe her I find that I can’t. She’s a bit too keen to discuss our continued survival, and, well, I’m not sure I’m quite ready to put her role in your attempted execution behind us just yet. She comes down to visit occasionally, and we all go out to some place neither you nor I like and she refuses to eat anything at anyway. Gabriel, of course, remains Gabriel. That seems unlikely to change any time soon.”  
  
This all would have been really fascinating to hear if Aziraphale had told him any of this even, like, ten minutes earlier.  
  
“They’re having quite the time of it, figuring out how to round out their numbers, apparently. Someone asked Raphael back, but they’re busy in Yemen- or were busy in Yemen a few years ago, I’m not sure where they are now- and apparently they considered their duties to Heaven discharged the day they blew the trumpet for Armageddon. Raguel, Jophiel, and Raziel cycled in each in turn, but none of them stayed long. And then someone dug up _Sammael_ of all beings. Apparently she showed up to Heaven in the form of seven interlocking wheels of flame, proclaimed that she and Lilith were married millenia ago and God had never said anything against it, called several Archangels an assortment of genitalia, and told Heaven to lose her summoning sigil before disappearing in a shower of blue smoke. That must have been a fun day. I’m almost sorry to have missed it.”  
  
He would have appreciated it more if he’d gotten this information at basically any other point in his life. “What about the picture?”  
  
“What picture?”  
  
“The picture!” Crowley cried, waving the mobile phone around, the screen still stubbornly blank. Then he remembered: he could do actual literal magic. A little bit of applied will later, and the screen lit up again, the picture on full display behind the date and time. “That. _This._ Explain this.”  
  
It wasn’t the most scandalous picture ever taken, or anything. They were both visible from roughly the shoulders up, seemingly fully clothed. They were flushed a bit, maybe with drink, maybe not. In the picture, Crowley’s face was turned to face them dead-on, while Aziraphale’s face was turned so he could plant a kiss on the corner of picture-Crowley’s mouth.  
  
“Oh dear,” said Aziraphale.

The thing was, kissing as a greeting went into and out of style, over and over and over again throughout the centuries like paddles on a waterwheel. So it wasn’t impossible that the picture was of that kind of kiss.

Except for the fact that once you thought about it for more than about ten seconds- and right now Crowley couldn’t think of anything else- that excuse fell apart. Aziraphale rarely actually touched his mouth to any part of Crowley, not unless he’d gotten _very_ drunk first, and even then, he generally avoided pressing his mouth to Crowley’s mouth. It also didn’t explain why he’d taken a picture of it, much less why he’d saved it and displayed it on something that seemed to be the sort of thing that other people (read: Aziraphale) would be able to see.

It didn’t explain the really embarrassingly happy expression on his face, in the picture. It didn’t explain the equally embarrassingly happy expression of Aziraphale’s face in the picture either. And it definitely didn’t explain the face Aziraphale was making now, all beet red and squirmy.

Could a face be squirmy? Aziraphale’s was certainly trying.

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said again. “Oh dear, this is not how I wanted you to find out.”

“Find out?” Crowley croaked.

“Yes, well, I- I was rather hoping that you’d simply get your memories back and we’d be able to- to proceed from there,” Aziraphale told him. “I didn’t- this isn’t how I wanted to do this.”

“And what is this, exactly?” Crowley asked. “Explain. Use small words. Just- tell me, please.”

“Well, I. That is,” Aziraphale looked down at the mobile, which Crowley was still clutching in his hand even though the screen had gone dark again. “We’re… together.”

“Together.”

“Involved,” Aziraphale said, sounding very much like it pained him to speak the words. “In a- in a relationship. With one another.”

“Aziraphale…”

“I’m sorry, I just- I don’t want to overwhelm you,” Aziraphale said, hands twisting anxiously around the cuffs of his sleeves in his lap.

“I’m- I’m already at overwhelmed, I passed overwhelmed a long time ago, I just. I need to know, Aziraphale, is this- is this what it looks like?”

_Together. Involved. In a relationship._ God or Satan or Whoever might hear him and feel like helping, but he really, really wanted that to be what it sounded like.

“Oh darling,” Aziraphale said with a sigh. He pursed his lips, squared his shoulders, and took a deep breath. Then he reached out and cupped Crowley’s cheek with one hand.

His hands were very soft. For a long moment, that was all Crowley could think about. Aziraphale’s hands had never been soft. Every other time Crowley could remembered being touched by him- and he could remember just about every pre-1481 instance that hadn’t involved him being on discorporation’s door, it was all _burned into his brain_ \- his hands had had a roughness to them: swordsman’s callouses along his palms, jagged edges to his nails, fingertips gone all dry with the ink that had seeped into them. There was none of that now. His hand was as soft as anything- as soft as the press of his lips to Crowley’s.

Because, oh yeah, Aziraphale was kissing him now. Full on, no two ways about it, directly on the mouth kissing. Crowley’s suddenly nerveless fingers released the mobile, and Aziraphale caught it with his free hand. He deposited it onto the table with a clatter, and then brought his hand to rest, very gently, on Crowley’s hip. Crowley took that to be an invitation, and quickly added two more items onto his list of soft things about Aziraphale: as soft as the curve of his belly pressed against Crowley’s, as soft as the downy curls between Crowley’s fingers.

After what could have been about ten seconds, or could have been most of eternity (but was, realistically speaking, probably closer to ten seconds than not) Aziraphale pulled back slightly, as much as he could pull back with Crowley pretty much sitting on his lap.

_Oh,_ Crowley thought, more than a little dazed. 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said. He looked a little dazed too. A little debauched. His mouth had gone all red and a little wet and Crowley had done that, had been invited to do that. “Crowley, we’re betrothed.”

Crowley immediately catapulted past dazed and into an emotion that was probably not panic, but felt a lot like panic. “ _What?_ ” he wheezed.

“We’re meant to be getting married,” Aziraphale said. “The wedding’s meant to be next month. That’s- that’s the get-together we have planned. Our wedding.”

Crowley’s mouth moved silently for a while before he could actually make any sounds with it. “I- I- I- that-” he stammered.

“You need some time to process things?” Aziraphale suggested.

Crowley latched onto the idea. “Yeah! Yeah, that’s- that sounds good, yes, definitely that.” He stood abruptly, and snatched up the mobile. “Yeah, I’m just- I’m going to- processing! I’m going now!” And with that he dashed away up the stairwell.

He didn’t stop until he was back in his solarium, the door latched firmly behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My expanding brain take on Aziraphale and bebop, since I know that's what everyone cares about right now:  
> Big Brain: Aziraphale knows full well that it's not bebop, and is only calling it that to annoy Crowley.   
> Galaxy Brain: He knows it's not bebop because he knows enough about actual bebop to know what it isn't. (He didn't even _like_ bebop, it was just really hard to move around in Soho, much less get a drink in Soho, circa that late 40s and early 50s without hearing bebop and learning a bit about it through osmosis.)  
> Universe Transcending Brain: This is just the latest iteration of Aziraphale misnaming things to annoy Crowley, and Crowley has never caught on to it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, it is I, updating the amount of chapters I think it will take!
> 
> A general warning for this chapter: Aziraphale talks about COVID-19. It's all very much in the past tense by the time he talks about it.

“What does he mean, we’re _betrothed_?” he hissed. The begonia before him trembled satisfyingly. Distantly, he realized that he really had to hand it to his future self: this was much more gratifying than yelling into the void and wondering if She was even pretending to listen. Of course, he also had to hand it to his future self for talking the angel into marrying him, apparently. “What does that even mean?”

He spun around, and found himself addressing some kind of fern. “Is this a paperwork thing? Does this protect us somehow? Is it for taxes?”

Except that didn’t make any sense, not with the kissing. Well, unless this marriage thing was some kind of protection ritual and it required consummation to validate it. Then maybe they were just practicing, with the kissing?

Fuck, did they practice more than kissing? Did they… practice the consummation?

He realized that he had the tips of his fingers pressed to his lips. “FUCK?!?!?!?!!” he yelled. He almost threw something, but he didn’t know what he had up here that he actually liked, so he settled for banging his fist against the table next to the tool wall. “Fuck.”

“He knows now, right? I mean, he’s has to know,” he mumbled to a pair of pruning shears. “He might not have known before, but that was _before_. I couldn’t hide it from him while we’re living together, could I? Not- not when we’re getting married.”

He turned around so that he was leaning back against the table as opposed to forwards into it. “We’re getting married,” he said again.

He hadn’t pictured it before, he really hadn’t. Even when he was a woman and faking being married would have saved them a lot of hassle, he very pointedly had not brought it up, because for all that marriage was a business arrangement as often as not (for all that their still tentative as far as he could remember Arrangement was supposed to be all business) there was still all that other stuff just beneath the surface. The whole Song of Songs thing. The _mush_. That stuff.

“Fuck,” Crowley said again, burying his head in his hands. Then he said it again in a few more languages, just to try and get it out of his system.

The problem was he was carrying a great deal of mush around with him, some of it thousands of years old. And he tried to shove it down, he tried to compact it into something a little more collected, and every time he thought he might have succeeded- every time they hadn’t run into one another for a while, or they had a fight- they’d run into one another again, and get to talking, and he’d say something to make Aziraphale smile and suddenly there would be even more mush than there had been previously.

And there was no way he had been able to hide that from Aziraphale, not with- not with all of this closeness. So, he had to know, right?

So, how much did he know? Had Crowley said to him at some point _Hey, remember when we met on the wall of the garden? Sometimes I feel like I Fell a second time that day, for you._ Sat- Someone, he hoped not. That was just embarrassing.

He was embarrassing, and Aziraphale had to know that by now. And he had to have accepted it. They lived together! He had an entire magically constructed solarium above Aziraphale’s shop! They kissed.

Oh _Someone_ , they kissed. Probably more than the one time he could remember.

He looked down at the mobile he’d brought with him. Yes. They’ve definitely kissed more than once.

“Right,” Crowley said, still eyeing the thing. “Show me what other pictures you have on here.”

For reasons he couldn’t fathom, his attempts to miraculously call up each picture on his mobile resulted in the mobile showing several pictures in sequence while that loverboy song the Bentley had been singing earlier played. He watched it three times to be sure he’d gotten everything, taking breaks in between to scream a little bit at a nearby ficus.

Most of them were of Aziraphale: in the middle of eating cake with his eyes fluttered closed as he savored the taste, at the center of a group of people wearing what had to be a staggering expensive amount of heavily dyed and embroidered clothing in a wide array of colors, looking over the top of those ridiculous spectacles as he poured over a book repair in progress with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, smiling gently as the sunset lit up his face as he leaned over the railing of some kind of balcony with a view of the sea, all dewy-eyed with his hand placed over his heart as he stood beneath an apple tree. He looked happy. More than that, he looked _relaxed_ : settled and unwound in a way Crowley was just now realizing he normally wasn’t.

Quite a few of the rest of the pictures were of cakes for some reason, but the rest were of the two of them together: arms around one another, faces smiling, or faces pressed together.

Yep, yeah, they definitely kissed. Kissing… was very definitely a thing that they did.

He stared down at the mobile wondering if those were all the pictures on his phone, or if he should try the miracle again and see what he got when there was a knock on the door. Crowley let out an undignified squawk and dropped the mobile with a clatter.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale called through the door.

Crowley made a nearly unembarrassing affirmative noise.

“You’ve been in there for several hours now,” Aziraphale said, which was true: the sky surrounding him was dark, and had been for a while now. “And I don’t mean to rush you! I know this is a lot for you to take in, so I just- well. I’ve got tapas.”

“Tapas?” Crowley repeated.

“Yes. I think that they were serving tapas in Spain in 1481- though I think back then it was just chorizo put over sherry to keep the flies out,” Aziraphale said.

Oh. _Those_ tapas.

“Yeah?” Some of the taverns he went drinking in did that- though most stopped bothering when it became clear that he wasn’t really interested in eating. One place had kept at it. The owner had even come over to ask him if he had a problem with ham- by which he clearly meant to ask if he was secretly keeping kosher because he was secretly a Jew.

He’d handled it. He’d been drunk enough by that point that he had only the vaguest of recollection as to how- something something wife run off with the butcher yadda yadda caught with a visiting merchant’s ring in his shirt blah blah blah the kitchen might have caught on fire at some point- but he’d definitely handled it, and the guy wasn't going to be bothering anyone else any time soon.

“Well, the menu has expanded a bit since then, and they’ve caught on elsewhere around the world. There’s a place not far from us that has a traditional menu- well, traditional to contemporary Spaniards, at least- and they do deliver, so I got you a sampler platter, in case you felt like eating. Oh! And I made you a barraquito. It’s a bit sweeter than your usual wont, but it’s coffee and alcoholic, so it tends to tick enough of your boxes to be enjoyable. I’ll just- I’ll just leave that here, then. You- you come down when you’re ready. Or- or whenever you like. I’ll be there.”

Crowley didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. After a minute or so to rally, he walked over to the door and pulled it open. He’d half expected to find Aziraphale still standing there, fussing with his cuffs, but the landing was deserted save for a platter containing several small dishes covered with transparent tops clouding over with condensation, and a layered drink topped with a lemon and sprinkling of cinnamon.

For a moment he stared at the platter. Then, curious almost in spite of himself, he opened the closest container, to find three small, wrinkled potatoes covered in a red sauce staring back at him.

“Fuck it,” he muttered, putting it back down on the platter. He could stay up here and yell at the plants and the food a bit more, but there was only one real way for him to get answers was to ask Aziraphale for them.

So he was just going to have to do that.

In a minute. When he was ready.

“Fuck it,” he said again, and forced himself to march down the stairs.

* * *

“It must be just about midnight, angel. What kind of absolute lunatic is up and cooking at midnight?”  
  
As Crowley entered the kitchen he realized that the answer was, at least in part, Aziraphale. Aziraphale was the kind of absolute lunatic who was up and cooking at midnight, to judge from the way he was bent over an open stove that was radiating heat.  
  
“I’m an idiot,” Crowley said, before Aziraphale could say anything. “Let me just go and try that again.”  
  
He turned to leave, but Aziraphale protested “Oh no, don’t! It’s fine, I’m just- this has become something of a nervous habit of mine.” He chuckled bashfully, and when Crowley turned around he was gesturing behind him to the kitchen. Now that Crowley was paying attention he could tell that it had been in use for a while. There was a pile of baked goods by the back door, and several batter-encrusted bowls strewn out near the sink.  
  
“Midnight baking?” Crowley asked.  
  
“Baking in general. Erm, I already called ahead and the shelter is expecting to find a few more loaves of bread yet, so I should keep baking for a bit, but if you want to set up...” He trailed off when he realized that the kitchen table was also covered with various baking supplies. He sighed, and snapped, and the kitchen was set to rights in a flurry of crockery and utensils, dirty ones suddenly clean, unnecessary items put back into the cabinets, and everything Aziraphale was still using set on the counters, leaving the table free.  
  
Unsure of what else to do, Crowley sat down at the table. Aziraphale bustled around, checking some dough that was resting beneath towels with yellow ducks embroidered around the edges, and selecting one to knead. The sound of him working the dough over filled what would have otherwise been a very awkward silence.  
  
“So. We’re betrothed,” Crowley said, when it became obvious that Aziraphale wasn’t going to say anything.  
  
“Yes. Yes, we are,” Aziraphale said, way too evenly.  
  
Alright, they were going to fake this being a casual discussion, Crowley could do that. “Is it- how did that happen, exactly?”  
  
“Oh, well. I proposed,” Aziraphale told him.  
  
“You did?” Crowley asked, feeling a bit wrong-footed.  
  
“Yes. I did,” Aziraphale confirmed. Before Crowley could come up with another question to fill the silence that followed his answer, he added. “I beat you to it by about two hours. You thought I would want to wait until after the dessert course, but I just didn’t want to lose my nerve.” He laughed nervously. “Again. I’d had the ring for _months_.”  
  
“Ring?”  
  
“Yes. I think- was that the tradition in Spain in 1481?”  
  
“At the wedding, maybe, if you were wealthy enough for it,” Crowley said.  
  
“Oh, yes. Well. It’s since become the tradition to propose with a ring to your intended. Oftentimes the person who proposes gets a ring to go along with it, but that’s not necessary. And then the couple exchanges another set of rings at the wedding.”  
  
“That’s- okay.” Crowley looked down at his hands, which were bare. They’d been bare when he’d woken up, right? He hadn’t accidentally banished his betrothal ring into aether, had he?  
  
“Oh, I have yours,” Aziraphale said hurriedly. “We took them off so we wouldn’t get them all scuffed up while we were erecting the wards and moving our stuff into the cottage. I picked them up before we left.”  
  
He put his hand into his vest pocket, and pulled out a silver ring, consisting of two wings, between which was set a ruby and two small emeralds, looking more than a little like an apple. It also looked more than a little like the ring Aziraphale had been wearing up until now, only his was golden, and the wings bracketed a fire opal upon which was mounted a sword. He must have put his ring away too- probably wasn’t good to make bread with a ring on like that.  
  
“We even went to the same jeweler, as you can see,” Aziraphale said, following his gaze to his finger, bare one moment and ringed the next. He sounded almost bashful. “They had a bit of a bet going, to see which of us would propose first. I made the young lady who works the counter very happy, she was the only one who bet on me.”  
  
“Yeah,” Crowley said, nodding, though he wasn’t sure what exactly he was responding to.  
  
“I rather think I made you happier, though,” Aziraphale said, and slipped the ring onto his suddenly nerveless finger.  
  
Crowley stared at it for a long time. “What does this mean?” He blurted out.  
  
“Well,” Aziraphale said with a frown. “The jewels are supposed to be an apple, as a sort of nod to the way we met-”  
  
“No, no, I don’t mean-” Crowley stopped, and forced himself to take a deep breath. “Look, people get married for all sorts of reasons. It’s good business sense, there’s an alliance that needs sealing, it secures something, it-”  
  
“Oh!” Aziraphale cried, his eyes widening. “Oh no, Crowley- I love you.”  
  
Whatever else Crowley had been about to say left him all at once, in a meat grinder of consonants that rendered it fit only for particularly dodgy sausage.  
  
“I love you. I’m in love with you. I’m sorry, I should have led with that,” Aziraphale said. He had his hands wrapped around Crowley’s. They still felt unreally soft.  
  
“Yeah,” Crowley managed to croak. “You might have done.”  
  
They sat there in silence for another long while.  
  
“You’re in love with me,” Crowley said eventually.  
  
“Yes. I love you a great deal, dearest,” Aziraphale said. He raised one hand up to cup Crowley’s cheeks. “That’s why I asked you to marry me. I want to spend the rest of eternity together.”  
  
Crowley felt the sudden urge to run back up to the solarium and scream himself hoarse into whichever bit of greenery was closest.  
  
“And you know that I love you?” He hadn’t actually meant to make that a question.  
  
“ _Yes,_ ” Aziraphale said. “It’s one of the biggest regrets of my existence, that I didn’t tell you that your feelings were returned sooner.”  
  
“Tell me now?” Crowley asked. “I mean, how did we- and when did you- how does this even work?”  
  
“It works quite well, I should think,” Aziraphale said, smiling slightly. “Better than I dared to dream, certainly. As to the rest-”  
  
There was a small ding from the counter.  
  
“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said, looking towards the oven. “I really ought to get a wiggle on with these breads. Do you mind if I keep working as we talk?”  
  
“No, of course not,” Crowley said, though he honestly really wanted Aziraphale to keep holding his hands and his face and maybe even kiss him again. But, right now, he wanted answers more.  
  
“Thank you,” Aziraphale said, placing one too-short peck on Crowley’s lips before hurrying over to the oven.

* * *

At first, it didn’t seem like Aziraphale actually wanted to talk to him at all. He checked on his bread, and his dough and ignored Crowley entirely until Crowley broke down and asked “So when did we- when did we, you know. When did this start? The whole involved in a relationship thing.”  
  
“Romantically?” Aziraphale asked.  
  
“Yes,” Crowley said, after a moment to realize that Aziraphale had seriously asked that question and was waiting for an answer. “Yes romantically involved in a romantic relationship, with romance. That.”  
  
“Oh, that’s quite a recent development.” Aziraphale took a deep breath. “Roughly nine years.”  
  
Crowley slotted that into the mental timeline he’d been constructing. “So, a year after the apocalypse?”  
  
“Not quite, but close,” Aziraphale confirmed.  
  
“Is the timing significant, or-?”  
  
“Yes, and no,” Aziraphale replied.  
  
Crowley was about to point out how useless that was as an answer, when Aziraphale sighed and added. “I rather tried my best to keep you at arm’s length for a while, after everything was done. Old habits, and old fears, and all that. And I was quite certain that I was going to Fall.”  
  
“What.”  
  
“I thought I was going to Fall. I’d defied Heaven, that’s sort of the traditional punishment, for all that our foiled executions had an element of poetic irony to them. I rather thought that when _that_ failed, they would default back to tradition, and I didn’t want you to have to see it.”  
  
“Oh.” Crowley sat with that for a minute. “I’ve told you you’re an idiot already for that, right?”  
  
Aziraphale laughed, sounding relieved. “Yes, you were rather firm on that point once I came clean with it.” He turned around to face Crowley for the first time since they’d started this conversation. He made a picture: sleeves rolled up, pastel blue apron tied around his middle, duck-spangled towel thrown over one shoulder. There was even an improbably adorable smudge of flour on his nose. “It made sense at the time. I couldn’t quite picture life without Heaven hanging over me, I think, so I just… didn’t, and acted accordingly. It was- well, it probably would have been harder if it hadn’t been for COVID-19.”  
  
“Which is..?”  
  
“It was a plague, of sorts,” Aziraphale told him. “Not as bad as you’re doubtlessly picturing,” he added hastily at the alarmed expression on Crowley’s face. “I mean, millions died before they figured out how to effectively vaccinate, and-”  
  
“Millions died and it’s not as bad as I’m picturing?” Crowley demanded.  
  
“It was what they call a pandemic,” Aziraphale said. “The whole world was infected at more or less the same time. The world-wide population is roughly seven billion people, for comparison’s sake.”  
  
“How do you even feed that many- you know what, never mind, we can get to that later. So. A plague.”  
  
“Yes. And it was quite awful for a time. So many more people got sick than died, for one thing, and many of them are going to have lingering respiratory problems for the rest of their lives, they think, and some of them even have brain damage from hypoxia. London rather shut down- a lockdown. Everyone was meant to stay at home and not to go out for anything other than necessities,” Aziraphale said. “You were still living in Mayfair at the time. It made for a convenient excuse to stay apart. You slept there from May until July. I stayed here, and I learned to bake, and I waited to Fall, all while it rather seemed like the world was about to end despite our best efforts anyway.”  
  
“But it didn’t,” Crowley said.  
  
“No. It didn’t,” Aziraphale said. “And I didn’t Fall.”  
  
There was another small ding, and Aziraphale turned back to his breads.  
  
“So what convinced you?” Crowley asked, once Aziraphale had finished fussing. “That you weren’t going to Fall, I mean.”  
  
“Heaven, strangely enough,” Aziraphale said. “July rolled around, and you woke up, and shortly thereafter the pubs and restaurants began to reopen, if only for a brief period. You tempted me out for lunch, and I’d missed both you and eating out terribly and so took no convincing at all, and we went out and then Heaven attacked us.”  
  
“Like, outside?” Crowley asked.  
  
Aziraphale nodded.  
  
“On the streets?”  
  
He nodded again.  
  
“In broad daylight?”  
  
Another nod.  
  
“In front of the humans?”  
  
“Yes. Though, you must understand, 2020 was a very strange year.”  
  
“Strange enough to excuse angels fighting in the streets?” Crowley demanded.  
  
“According to one of them, yes, and he was rather disappointed with himself for not anticipating such a turn of events,” Aziraphale said.  
  
Crowley blinked.  
  
“We tracked down the eyewitnesses afterwards, many of them seemed to think it was some kind of street theatre meant to entertain those who went out, which made things simple. We just needed to muddle the pictorial evidence enough so that we weren’t recognizable, and that was enough to get by with.”  
  
“Humanity got jaded in the last five hundred years,” Crowley said.  
  
“Humanity found other things to be inspired by than the likes of us over the last five hundred years,” Aziraphale said. “Which is probably for the best, though I do miss being a muse.”  
  
“Muse?”  
  
“Oh, well. People used to paint pictures, you know? And carve statues too, on occasion, it was immensely gratifying.”  
  
Crowley’s eyes narrowed. “Are you the reason Donatello was so convinced that cherubim looked like-” he gestured towards Aziraphale’s everything.  
  
“Oh no, he’d started that long before I met him, relatively speaking,” Aziraphale said, though there was a hint of a smirk playing on his lips.  
  
Aziraphale was sometimes smug now, Crowley realized abruptly. He was smug, and it looked handsome on him, which just wasn’t _fair_.  
  
“So, we got attacked by angels in front of crowds of people, and then somehow shrugged that off, and then-”  
  
“Well,” Aziraphale interrupted him. “I wouldn’t say _crowds_ , per se, it was more like perhaps two or three dozen individuals. Many people chose to stay indoors even with the quarantine being lifted, and those who ventured out had to stay a distance of six feet apart from anyone not in their social bubble. And you were supposed to wear a mask when you went out, to cover your nose and mouth. I- just barely- persuaded you not to go out in a plague doctor’s mask, and you miracled up this absolute monstrosity that made it look like half your face had been gnawed off. People gave us a wide berth as a result.”  
  
Crowley stared at him, trying to will his words into making sense.  
  
“2020 was a very strange year,” Aziraphale said again. “It may have topped 1374 and the dancing plague.”  
  
“You know what? I’m just going to take your word on that,” Crowley said with a sigh. Aziraphale turned around, and when turned back he was holding the platter of tapas he’d brought for Crowley earlier.  
  
“Here,” he said, setting the platter down on the table and handing him the drink.  
  
“Thanks,” Crowley said, and took a cautious sip as Aziraphale settled into the chair opposite him. It was a lot sweeter than he would prefer, but coffee and alcohol? That was a good combination, it turned out. “So. We did shrug off being attacked by angels, though?”  
  
“Shrug off is perhaps the wrong term,” Aziraphale said. “We fended them off, though, yes. We- you, especially- figured that Armageddon wasn’t going to be the end of it, and we took some precautions. Nothing compared to what we have now, but more than they were expecting. And it wasn’t an attempt on our lives, not at first. At first they were trying to kidnap us. They wanted to bring us up to Heaven and try to figure out how we’d made ourselves immune to hellfire and holy water.”  
  
“Well, that sounds horrific,” Crowley said, visions of the work of Herophilus and Erasistratus dancing in his head- only performed on people who were still alive.  
  
“Yes, I rather imagine it would have been. But we managed to discorporate many of the angels the Archangels brought with them, and then we took off running. We bought ourselves enough time to fortify ourselves against further attack, and then we managed to discorporate Gabriel and Uriel, and seriously wound Sandalphon. Michael took him and retreated, and then-”  
  
“And then what?”  
  
“And then, as the dust began to settle, I realized two things. I realized that if Heaven could compel me to Fall, they would have done so, so clearly I wasn’t about to Fall. Then I looked over at you and I realized that I was a fool not to have kissed you earlier, and I was only compounding my foolishness with every second that passed without my kissing you, so I kissed you.”  
  
“Ngk,” Crowley said, not falling out of his chair with great effort.  
  
“Yes,” Aziraphale said. “That’s what you said then too.”  
  
“Do I-” Crowley took a large sip of his barraquito to fortify himself. “Do I do this all the time now? Just forget how to talk and hold things and exist as a fucking person because you batted your eyes at me?”  
  
“No,” Aziraphale said with a laugh. “No, not all the time. I- in truth, I do rather go to some lengths to provoke that reaction in you. I- I really quite enjoy flustering you, after all these years of pretending not to be flustered by you.”  
  
“Right,” Crowley drawled. “And just- how many years are we talking about here?”  
  
“I couldn’t tell you,” Aziraphale replied, holding up a hand to forestall Crowley’s protests. “Literally! I’ve played so many mind games with myself over the years that I truly don’t know when I fell in love with you. I first realized that I could love you nearly two thousand years ago, if that makes any difference.”  
  
“Rome or Jesus?” Crowley asked.  
  
“Rome,” Aziraphale answered promptly. “I realized that I _could_ love you, and then I realized that we’d be in terrible danger if either one of us were to openly act upon it, and patted myself on the back for not being in love with you. I did this, again and again for centuries until 1941, when I realized that I did, in fact, love you. But did I fall in love with you then? At some point between meeting in Rome and 1941? Or did I love you in Rome already and just refused to acknowledge it? It’s possible. You’re very loveable.”  
  
“That’s fucked up,” Crowley said, his cheeks flaming.  
  
“Yes, I know,” Aziraphale said with a groan. “I was just- I was scared. I was so scared, all the time, at all hours of the day and night, just constantly afraid. I don’t know how I managed to get anything done, looking back at it now.”  
  
“And you’re not scared anymore?” Crowley asked.  
  
“It’s different,” Aziraphale said, after a moment, staring down at his hands. “It’s not- it used to seem so _inevitable_. The end of it all. We were on opposite sides, and there was no way to reconcile that, so. It wasn’t a matter of fearing what would happen, just- it was a matter of how badly it would hurt when it did.” His mouth twisted. “It’s not like that anymore. I still get scared, of course. When Beelzebub showed up a few days and- well. I was terrified then, but it’s different.” After a moment he looked up and smiled at Crowley. “And scared of you- of us? No, I’ll not be making that mistake again.”  
  
Crowley smiled back, and, before he could overthink it, reached out and took Aziraphale’s hand. Aziraphale turned it over and interlocked their fingers, the motion easy and well-practiced.  
  
“Well, good,” Crowley said. “One of us needs to not be a stammering idiot when we kiss.”

* * *

They sat there for a while, and then Aziraphale got up to resume baking, leaving Crowley to nibble on the tapas and sip his barraquito as he tried to figure out what he was asking next.  
  
“So what are these called, then?” he asked, pointing to the two remaining wrinkled potatoes swimming in red sauce.  
  
“ _Papas arrugadas con mojo rojo_ ,” Aziraphale replied.  
  
“So… wrinkled potatoes in red sauce?” Crowley checked. There hadn’t been a word for potatoes in any dialect of Spanish in 1481, but _papas_ sounded likely. “Descriptive name.”  
  
He might be dragging his feet when it came to asking more questions about their betrothal. In all fairness, it wasn’t like Aziraphale was volunteering any information either. There they stayed, pretended to be too absorbed in food to really talk, until there was a knock on the door.  
  
“Oh! Goodness, you’re early, I’m still putting the glaze on the scones!” Aziraphale said as he opened the door.  
  
“Yeah, I figured I might need a few minutes to load everything else up into the van,” said a young man as he stepped inside the kitchen. Crowley discreetly snapped and put his sunglasses back on before he could see.  
  
“Crowley, this is Dion,” Aziraphale introduced, as the young man stepped carefully around the tottering piles of baked goods which covered every available surface.  
  
Crowley waved sardonically.  
  
“Uh?” Dion said, looking confused.  
  
“Dion, Crowley had a knock on the head the other day and now doesn’t remember anything from the last several years,” Aziraphale explained.  
  
“That can actually happen?” Dion asked.  
  
“Either that or I time travelled,” Crowley replied.  
  
“That sucks,” Dion said, sounding oddly sincere for that choice of words. “Geez, you’ve got the wedding coming up and everything.”  
  
“Tqw?” Crowley replied, a bit thrown.  
  
Dion rounded on Aziraphale, who had pulled out a cart made of metal wires that looked like it should be squeaking but didn’t make a sound. “You didn’t tell him you were getting married?”  
  
“Yes, I did,” Aziraphale protested, rolling his eyes.  
  
“He told me yesterday after I found a picture of us kissing on my mobile phone,” Crowley clarified.  
  
“Oh my God!” Dion exclaimed.  
  
“I didn’t want to overwhelm him!” Aziraphale protested. “He’s missing a lot of time! I’m surprised he figured out how to use the contraption.”  
  
“Oh my God,” Dion said again. “What were you thinking?”  
  
“I was thinking I’d give the specialist from Puerto Rico time to dig herself out from under the hurricane debris, come back here, and give a prognosis before I dumped everything on him,” Aziraphale grumbled, handing the cart off to him. “Now take this and let me finish my scones.”  
  
Dion worked in silence for a bit, carting out baked goods, giving Crowley odd looks all the while. Finally, when there wasn’t much left to do, he came up to him and asked. “So, like, how much time are you missing?”  
  
“A lot?” Crowley replied.  
  
“Like, how much is a lot?” Dion asked.  
  
Crowley panicked and forgot what year it was.  
  
“His memories cut off in early February ‘81,” Aziraphale said, coming to his rescue. “He was in Spain. There was a work thing, I believe.”  
  
“1981?” Dion asked. “You’re both… really older than you look, aren’t you?”  
  
“Thanks, it’s the wages of sin,” Crowley said, at the same time Aziraphale said “That’s what comes of good, clean living.”  
  
Dion snorted, and accepted the basket of freshly-glazed scones Aziraphale provided. “Thanks. And- well. I hope you two can still have the wedding you want.”  
  
“Well, I certainly intend to make every attempt at-” Aziraphale began.  
  
Crowley cut him off. “Oh, it’s still on.”  
  
Aziraphale looked at him, startled.  
  
“Aaand I’ll leave you to it,” Dion said, and left them to it.  
  
“He seemed like a nice kid,” Crowley said, because it was easier than saying _I’m already in love with you, of course I’m marrying you, if you still want me_.  
  
“Oh yes, he is, rather,” Aziraphale said. “It was quite a fortuitous day when he broke into my shop.”  
  
“When he what.”  
  
“He broke into my shop,” Aziraphale said blithely. “It was during the pandemic. A lot of people were out of work, including his mother, and somehow he and a few of his mates got it into their heads that sacking the cash registers of shuttered shops would alleviate some of the pressures of unemployment from their families. I gave them a stern talking to, and then sent them home with some of the surplus cakes I’d baked. Dion kept coming back, especially once the lockdown was lifted. Eventually we ended up hashing out a sort of scheme wherein everyone who learned to bake during the pandemic could pass along their baked goods to those who needed them, and now he runs a soup kitchen attached to a homeless shelter.”  
  
“That’s- I don’t even know what I was expecting, honestly,” Crowley admitted, trying to fit everything together. “And he knows we’re getting married?”  
  
“Well, we are having guests at the wedding,” Aziraphale said. “You insisted on a garishly large venue, so we have more than enough room for everyone we interact with on a regular basis.”  
  
That, Crowley decided, was probably as good a starting point as they were going to get. “Yeah, so: how is our wedding supposed to work? I was going to ask which of us was going to wear the dress, but I gather that’s no longer an issue.”  
  
“Oh no, any two individuals may marry, no matter their gender,” Aziraphale said. “Marriage equality, it’s called. It passed into law a good fifteen years ago now- in this part of the country, at least, Northern Ireland didn’t pass the required legislation into law until 2019.”  
  
“So, England moved past the whole hot poker up the arse thing, then?” Crowley asked.  
  
Aziraphale rolled his eyes. “Oh for the love of- did you start that legend?”  
  
“Well I had to pad out my report _somehow_ and Hell loves a hot poker up the arse,” Crowley told him.  
  
Aziraphale sighed heavily. “Yes. Legally, and in many respects culturally, England has moved past the whole ‘hot poker up the arse thing’, and thus we can be married even if we’re both man-shaped beings.”  
  
“Excellent,” Crowley said. He reached for his barraquito to take a congratulator sip, and found it empty.  
  
“Why don’t I break out some more whiskey, and we’ll go over all the details?” Aziraphale suggested.  
  
“Even better!” Crowley replied.

* * *

Some minutes later, Crowley found himself staring down something called a snow globe. There was no snow in evidence, but there were little particles of something shiny in the water which surrounded what was apparently a representation of London’s skyline.  
  
“Run me through this again,” Crowley said.  
  
“We are, at present, slated to be wed at the top of that building there,” Aziraphale said, tapping at the glass. “30 St Mary Axe.”  
  
“That one,” Crowley checked, giving the glass a tap of his own.  
  
“Yes. 30 St Mary Axe,” Aziraphale confirmed. “It’s also sometimes called The Gherkin.”  
  
“We’re getting married at the top of a building that looks like a wingless fascinus and is named after pickled cucumbers?”  
  
“You chose the venue,” Aziraphale informed him.  
  
Crowley stared down at the snowglobe for a moment. “Why?”  
  
“Well, for one thing, there’s a very good view of London from up there, and this has been our home for quite some time,” Aziraphale said. “For another, you wanted an, and I quote, “exorbitantly tacky” wedding and apparently that’s the most expensive place to get married in England.”  
  
“Really?”  
  
“It beat out several castles and manor houses, as I understand it,” Aziraphale said with a shrug.  
  
Crowley scrutinized the building in light of this new information. “It still looks like a giant penis.”  
  
“That’s where the tacky part of ‘exorbitantly tacky’ comes in, I believe,” Aziraphale pointed out.  
  
Crowley grumbled in concession to his point.  
  
“Besides, there are several good things about the venue,” Aziraphale continued. “The view, as I said, and the size. With everyone’s plus-ones and plus-more-than-ones, we have nearly a hundred people coming.”  
  
“We… what.”  
  
“Well, in all fairness, roughly a fifth of our guests belong to the Device family,” Aziraphale said. “Anathema’s been patching things up with them, and vice-versa, and she brought us along with backup the first few times she went home, and now they’re all _very_ invested in our relationship.”  
  
“What happened with Anathema’s family?” Crowley asked.  
  
“I’ve told you about the book? The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch?”  
  
“It saved our lives, you said.”  
  
“It did. With the very last prophecy in a book filled with hundreds of them. Agnes wrote for her descendants, primarily: warnings to keep them safe, tips to bring them happiness. They’re quite fabulously wealthy now, as a result: no need to worry about doctor’s bills or university fees or the cost of relocating to the other side of the Atlantic, much less keeping a roof over their heads, or where their next meal is coming from. Over several generations, the Devices came to the conclusion that this was less Agnes looking out for her family, and more Agnes looking out for _humanity_. One of them- namely Anathema- was meant to be one who would avert the Apocalypse, thereby saving the planet and everyone on it.”  
  
“Which seems to have panned out well,” Crowley said.  
  
“Yes but,” Aziraphale frowned and sighed. “It’s like this: Anathema is a child of prophecy. Her family felt an immense pressure to raise her in strict accordance with those prophecies, because the consequences of their failure would be the obliteration of all life on Earth. And as terrible as that pressure was for them, it was worse for Anathema, because she was expected to _be_ the person outlined in those prophecies, without regard for any desires she might develop independent of them.”  
  
“Ah,” Crowley said, squirming uncomfortably. “Yeah, I can see why she’d be upset about that.”  
  
“If you had your memories back, you’d know how her family felt too,” Aziraphale said, with a wry, almost bitter, smile. “We did something very similar to Warlock. Thankfully, since he had another set of parents- who are distant but do mean well- and we were only a daily fixture in his life for about five years the only lasting damage is a persistent disappointment in his own lack of reality-bending powers.”  
  
“Oh,” Crowley said.  
  
Somehow that made it all seem very real. Aziraphale had told him about it, of course, the years they’d spent playing Nanny and Gardener to the boy they’d thought was the Antichrist. He’d pictured it, their ludicrous costumes and their secret meetings. He hadn’t thought very much about the boy himself, about what it must have been like for him. He hadn’t quite thought about there being a young man out there who had probably been pretty attached to him as a child.  
  
And Crowley couldn’t even remember what he looked like.  
  
“Anathema cut off contact with her parents for a time. Her mother had thought she might do that- no prophecies, just intuition- and had considered that to be an acceptable price to pay for the continued survival of everyone on the planet, Anathema very much included. As I understand it, the reality was harder to bear than she’d thought it would be. Anathema has always been close to her cousins and grandparents, though. She kept in contact with them, and inevitably, crossed paths with her mother again through those connections. She’s never shared the details of that conversation with us, but whatever words were said, it was enough for her to agree to start speaking with them again.”  
  
Crowley nodded. He couldn’t remember what Anathema looked like either.  
  
“It sounds like we’re going to have quite the wedding party. Witches, the Antichrist… who does wedding ceremonies these days?”  
  
“Oh, quite a few people! We’re having a rather agnostic Unitarian minister do ours,” Aziraphale told him.  
  
Crowley blinked. “Agnostic.”  
  
“Generally that means something like ‘one who does not know whether or not to believe in the existence of God’, but in this case, I’m decently certain ey does believe in God, but isn’t sure whether or not She’s good at Her job.”  
  
“Well that makes two of us,” Crowley muttered, even as he took note of the minister’s pronoun. It was always a bit of a relief, whenever whatever human society he was currently living in figured out that there were more than two options for gender.  
  
Aziraphale rolled his eyes but, surprisingly, didn’t comment. “Hence eir inclusion in the proceedings. We didn’t want someone who might try to bless us.”  
  
Crowley winced. “Good call.” It wouldn’t do for him to break out in hives at his own wedding. Someone, he was going to have his own wedding. “So, no blessings… what kind of vows are we using?”  
  
“Oh bugger,” Aziraphale groaned. “Our vows.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“There’s a new tradition that we decided to use: writing our own vows,” Aziraphale said miserably.  
  
It took Crowley a moment to work out the implications of that. “I’ve forgotten my wedding vows?”  
  
“And I don’t know what they are either.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I barely know what mine are. I keep going back over them and changing things.”  
  
Crowley stared at him.  
  
“Well it’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to share with your spouse-to-be until they’re your spouse-becoming!” Aziraphale protested. “It’s the modern day equivalent of the groom seeing the bride in her wedding dress before the big day!”  
  
That also had to be a new tradition because Crowley had certainly never heard of it before. Most people didn’t get a special dress for their wedding unless they were royalty or something.  
  
“Oh bugger again,” Aziraphale swore. “I don’t know what you’ve picked to wear either.”  
  
“How do you not-”  
  
“Oh, we had a tiff about it two, three years ago? You were trying to get me to agree not to wear tartan- which is ridiculous, you’re the only reason I have my own tartan colors at all in the first place- and we ended up agreeing to provide one another with fabric swatches and be surprised come the wedding day. So for all I know you _are_ wearing a dress.”  
  
“That wouldn’t cause any problems?” Crowley asked.  
  
“No?” Aziraphale replied, looking confused by the question. “I hardly mind. And everyone else in attendance already knows that you’re not one hundred percent a man one hundred percent of the time, so they can’t really be shocked by it. They’ll keep their comments to themselves. Well, all apart from Shadwell. Did you know until recently he’d apparently just assumed that he was going to be walking me down the aisle?”  
  
“I mean, I might have, but it’s kind of hard for me to tell now.”  
  
“It is utterly baffling. I don’t know where he got the idea from,” Aziraphale continued, as though Crowley had not spoken. “I am several thousand years older than him. I lost that coin toss, so you were going to be the one escorted down the aisle, and then you decided we needed a chuppah, so now we’re going to be walking towards it from opposite ends of the room, and do you know what the most baffling part of it all is? He ran circles around the both of us for _years_.”  
  
“What was that about a chuppah?” Crowley asked.  
  
“A chuppah,” Aziraphale said. “You know, the canopy the happy couple traditionally stands under when- oh, right. That tradition had only come back into favor in Poland before your memories cut out.”  
  
“Oh,” Crowley said. A chuppah used to be a tent, and then it was a veil, and he supposed there was no reason why it shouldn’t go back to being a tent of some kind.  
  
“Some people use their tallit, but mine is extremely old and, obviously, we’re avoiding holy objects. Most people rent their chuppahs these days, though you can buy one and have it customized if you have several hundred pounds laying around. That’s what we did. Well, what you did. One day, perhaps three years ago now, you announced that we needed a chuppah, and you’d found the perfect one. It really is perfect, you know. I was almost quite cross with you about it- we’d agreed not to use miracles for any of the wedding preparations, in order to avoid celestial gatecrashers, and it was so perfect that I was certain you’d miracled it up. But, no. You’d just placed a very specific custom order some months prior, and the results were nothing short of spectacular.”  
  
Crowley snapped, and the mobile phone obligingly appeared in his hand.  
  
“Right,” he said. “Show me.”  
  
Before his mobile could obey, Aziraphale snapped himself and a frame picture appeared in his hands.  
  
“You told the woman in charge of custom chuppahs that you’d had a strict upbringing and then fallen out of the faith- which I suppose isn't entirely untrue- but now felt weird about having a wedding without a canopy over your head. She was sympathetic- her wife had had similar feelings on the matter during their wedding- and rather doted on you as a result, I think. She offered to take a picture of us beneath the chuppah after it had been set up. It came out quite lovely, so I had you print a copy out to be framed.” With that, he handed it over.

The two of them were in the picture. The Crowley-in-the-picture had his hair long and his clothing loose, while Aziraphale-in-the-picture looked the same as he did now, right down to the suit (he was wearing a different shirt with it in the picture, however). They were leaning in against one another, arms around each other, smiling as they looked at the other. They looked very happy.

“When Mrs. Cohen-Braun- that’s the woman who handled our chuppah, Mrs. Helena Cohen-Braun- took that picture, she told us that if she brought a rabbi in the stand under it with us we’d qualify as married. Which isn’t true, though you wouldn’t let me say it.”

Crowley nodded mutely.

“I don’t know if you can tell from the picture, but you had the poles painted to look a bit like miniature bookshelves, and the black line along the edge there is meant to be a snake. You can see the head resting upon the tail in the front from up close.”

It was a very beautiful chuppah, he supposed, though he wasn’t entirely sure what a chuppah typically looked like nowadays. Their canopy was blue, with scalloped edges trimmed with black (the snake, he supposed). In every half circle, there was a bit of gold embroidery that a bit of squinting revealed to be a sword. The poles had been painted with little rectangles (the bookshelves), and there were apple blossoms gathered at the corners. And there it was, the place where they were to be married.

Somehow, the picture felt significantly more real than the snow globe had.

“Crowley darling...”

Vision blurring, Crowley set the picture aside. “We’re getting married,” he said dully. “We’re getting married and I can’t remember-”

He cut himself off, because there were too many ways for him to end that sentence. He couldn’t remember his vows. He couldn’t remember what he was wearing. He could remember why he wanted a chuppah. He couldn’t remember any of their wedding guests, probably, unless he’d managed to make things up with Cain.

“I can’t remember.”

Suddenly Aziraphale was right there, his arms around him, his shoulder perfectly placed for Crowley to bury his head in it. He couldn’t remember Aziraphale proposing. He couldn’t remember buying the ring he’d intended to propose with. He couldn’t remember how they’d gotten together, or decided to live together, or practically anything at all.

“Why are your hands so soft?” he blurted out.

“Oh!” Aziraphale said, sounding almost as surprised by the question as Crowley was to hearing it come out of his own mouth. “Well. Humans have made great strides in manicures since Ancient Egypt. Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum would probably have tried to make Ms. Lo into a minor deity if they could have met her.”

Crowley choked out a laugh. It had been pretty much all fun up until now, a cornucopia of wildly improbable good things. No more slavery! Chocolate-covered coffee beans! No Heaven or Hell dictating their every move! No need to ride a horse ever again!

He was getting married to Aziraphale! Sure! Why not! Just throw that on there, like putting a cake on top of another cake that was somehow also a cornucopia.

But he’d missed it. No, worse than that: it wasn’t like it had happened while he was there or looking or anything like that. It had happened, and he’d been there and experienced it and then it had been taken from him, and now it was all missing from him. He was missing it, as a persistent state.

Also as a persistent state, Aziraphale was continuing to talk. “- we’re already planning to do it again in a few decades.”

“How’s that?” Crowley asked.

“Oh. Well. We thought we’d simply keep marrying one another every few decades. That’s another newer tradition, vow renewals. Not that we’d be telling most people that they’re vow renewals, we’d just pretend we were being married for the first time, but. Well. What I mean to say is that it’s not the end of things if we don’t get married next month.”

“No, don’t- you can’t just- I love you,” Crowley tried to explain.

“And I love you. And I will love you if you decide to put on sackcloth and run down to the relevant civil building right now to fill out the paperwork which declares us wed. I will love you if you decide to call it off for the time being and we don’t marry for another twenty years.” It was really unfair, how good Aziraphale had gotten at words, when he decided to actually use them. “You’ve put a lot of effort into making this wedding the perfect day, we both have, but there will be other perfect days for us, and many more wondrous ones, and more still that are merely good, and even not so good, and I will love you through all of them.”

“Is this part of your vows?” Crowley managed. “Are you spoiling your vows for me right now?”

“No!” Aziraphale protested, a little too quickly. After a moment he admitted “That was a part of what I had written, for a time, but I ended up cutting it out. It was getting a little too long.”

“Well, as long as you didn’t think it up on the fly,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale laughed.

They stayed like that for a moment, clinging tightly until Crowley pulled away, not really able to process so much emotion in one go.

“I’m going to- plants. To take care of the plants, I mean. And then, I- actually I’ll probably just go to sleep.”

Aziraphale nodded like this was a perfectly normal reaction. Maybe it was a normal reaction, at least for Crowley. How would he know? “I could join you, if you like,” Aziraphale offered.

“It’s not even midday yet,” Crowley protested weakly. “It’s barely even midmorning.”

“Yes, but to judge from yesterday, you will need to spend more than a few moments on your plants.”

“Which _might_ bring us to midday.”

“Well, I probably won’t join you to sleep. I’d just- I’d sit there and read. Next to you. On the bed. Only if you’re comfortable with that.”

“Like you did the other night,” Crowley said, and then gave himself a shake. Had it only been the other night when he’d woken up to find Aziraphale crawling into bed with him? It felt like so long ago. A year, at least.

“Yes,” Aziraphale answered simply.

“Yeah, that- yeah. Sure.” That probably wasn’t going to discorporate him, at this point. “Sounds like a plan.”

He didn’t quite flee back up the stairs, but it was a near thing.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fill for a prompt on the kink meme: "Basically since they can't kill Crowley and he's done so much for Hell over they years they decide instead to erase his memories back to a time when he was a loyal demonic go-getter. Which is obviously never. Aziraphale is distraught. Thinks he will have to win him back over. But this new/old version of Crowley is just over the moon that a future version of Aziraphale seems to like him so much and just is gobsmacked by all the attention as the Angel tries to ease him back into their friendship. (It was totally an established romance but Aziraphale isnt sure how to bring that part up) Basically I just want to see how a Crowley that has only really ever dealt with a more hostile Aziraphale would react to their modern dymamic. Other than than I'm not bothered by specifics."
> 
> Thus far I've been leaning into Anthony "Jack Pine Tree" Crowley being super stoked to have Aziraphale's affection directed at him, and not so much into Aziraphale's potential angst. This may change.
> 
> You can read a more typo-filled version, as well as the little drips and drabs as I upload them [here](https://good-omens-kink.dreamwidth.org/616.html?thread=725096#cmt725096).


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